


Commercial Brake

by freelance_writes11



Category: Animaniacs
Genre: 21st Century, Angst and Feels, Careers Have Issues, Emotional Baggage, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, My First Work in This Fandom, Open to Interpretation, Pre-Reboot, Sibling Rivalry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 28
Words: 63,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23979868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freelance_writes11/pseuds/freelance_writes11
Summary: “They’re zany to the max, and now Yakko, Wakko and Dot may finally be back with their first new episodes in nearly 20 years.” At least that’s what the promos say.A new wave of animation is going to be hitting America in the Fall, bringing back the soul, flair and glory days of Hollywood animation. Or so the Warners hope. It’s been twenty-two years. What happened in between those two decades of silence?
Relationships: Dot Warner & Wakko Warner & Yakko Warner
Comments: 73
Kudos: 139





	1. Be Careful What You Wish For

**August 1999**

_We’re packin’ our load,_   
_We’re hittin’ the road,_   
_Let’s sing it together again!_   
_Hey hey! We wanna be the first to touch the wishing star!_   
_We’re north-bourse bound—northbound board, leaving town…_

“Oh Christ, son of a bitch.”

“Back-to-One!”

It both helped and hurt that Dot’s world was her stage. It helped when it was time to perform; she forgot the cameras were there and acted like she was just in her normal life, and pretty soon forgot she was even performing. It hurt when it was time to perform that she forgot the cameras were there and that she was performing.

When she fumbled, so did her confidence. And vocabulary.

Two stagehands moved the sleigh prop back to its original place as Dot jumped out of it and rolled her eyes up to the sky. There was nothing that made her feel so elevated and yet so insignificant like flying all the way out to Switzerland to gather footage for her brother’s movie. Twelve days in and already she was sick of the place.

“What a potty mouth for such an elegant lady,” Wakko teased on their way back to the cameras in-shot of the Valais Alps in the distance.

“I thought you left all of that behind in the 50s.” There was a toying smirk on Yakko’s face as he readjusted his green scarf. “Ah well, it’s so nice to see silver screen legends turning into real fallible people in the same second.”

Dot scowled at the snickering boys and shoved them aside to get in her spot. “Shut up.”

Fooling the directors was always a cinch with mouths like her brothers. Liz might have been a professional at detecting fraudulence, but Yakko was a pro at delivering a flawless performance that 90% of the time no one even knew he was ad-libbing to fill in running time. Wakko had an interesting and charming enough disposition that he could fumble his way through enough takes.

At least when Dot worked in the coffee shop, every line she delivered had been rehearsed and perfected.

“ _Hungarian Rhapsody_ , take three.”

No amount of hailed acting, quick workflow, or expensive equipment could make up for the lack of plot that was currently _Wakko’s Wish_. Not to bash on Wakko’s solo-esque film debut or anything, but at the moment it was all over the place with too much singing, too little singing, not a lot of dialogue, not enough comedy.

Some of the scenes were foggy and often not shot in chronological order, and Rusty really wanted to focus more on the musical numbers while they were still in Valais − starting with the main segments taking place in what would be the snowy village square of Warnerstock.

Dot wouldn’t always get it right, but she was trying as hard as she knew how, always working to perfect a sincere performance.

_But we’re gonna get there first, you see,_   
_The one who gets there first will be_   
_In a super wagon, wrapped and bowed, then on the slow—snow, it’s gonna…_

“Nuts. Let me do it again.”

“Cut!”

There were times that the spotlight felt too much. Dot was a homebody at heart, but she liked being a star. Anyone would want to do something right, something special. It was the creative part that kept her going. Being an actress, that is. She enjoyed acting when she really hit it right, and she wasn’t another black-and-white toon who appeared at a studio just for the purpose of discipline.

“And I’m Dot! The impossibly cute one! With a cough. But you even have to—you got to admit that even… Let me do it again. Right now, keep rolling!”

Dot loved her character so much that she didn’t think she’d ever want to leave the part. The rest of the cast had become family in all of the six years they’d worked together. She loved them from the bottom of her heart, and not to sound vain, but from the type of stardom she had experienced and the many shenanigans she had gone through, she guessed she was born for the life.

She just didn’t know it.

* * *

**October 1999**

The Halloween sun hadn’t fully set and already candy wrappers were being blown over the leaf-strewn sidewalks. The warmth of summer left a fortnight ago, but tonight seemed like the first time since last winter that Wakko could really feel the frigid concrete through his feet. The air flowed through his jacket just like it had in the summer and early fall, only this time he couldn’t ignore it.

For his “costume” he was a ghost, concealed and shrouded like the dead he pretended to be whenever he wandered off filming grounds and caught a fanatic eye or two. He was glad to be back in Burbank even though he was still on the job. Anything was better than being 6,000 miles away from home.

But even back on California soil and returning to the movie lot for a seventh week of filming, Wakko wasn’t too sure how to soak in all the recent attention for “his” movie. That’s what so many people and toons were gabbing about lately − Wakko’s name in the title, Wakko Warner from _Animaniacs_ , Wakko’s Christmas movie. Even Yakko and Dot had teased on the occasion that he was finally getting his big Blockbuster break.

He didn’t think so. He was simply a toon on TV making kids and adults laugh until they spewed. He was a Warner brother, plain and simple.

Though it wasn’t likely that “his” movie would be released by December 25 with so many unique schedules, and Ruegger had mentioned the possibility of re-shooting more than once. Still, an _Animaniacs_ 100th special airing on Christmas morning would be grand.

Wakko trudged along the pavement at a sedate pace, listening to his steps that seemed to echo along the streets. Streets he never really got to tour privately because of performance blocking or a convention to guest star in San Diego. Streets of the haves and have-nots, those on Alvarado with their exotic lifestyles and those over in Richmond, drug addled and abused.

He only knew of this from all the lingo used in _Variety Speak_ or word of mouth. Nothing was ever really explored in person unless you were the talk of the town.

Against a hopeful kind of dark that helped the orange and red outdo the sky, Wakko could see the tin walls of the Warner Bros. Water Tower that was nothing more than a ghostly silhouette of some previous existence. The wind whistled through his long ears, bringing with it the laughter of three siblings who once “lived” there and the warning call of an extremely short man with a shorter temper to match to “get [the hell] back in that tower.”

Those walls hadn’t seemed so gray when he was a boy, nor did they seem so small. Looking at it now, it felt so alone, so empty.

How long had it been since it heard the milked jokes of a smart aleck who knew no better? How long had it been since it felt the clamoring and bumps along the walls when its escapees scrambled back inside for cover? It felt like no time had passed, yet as Wakko gazed upon the overgrown bushes and chipped paint, it was evident just how wrong he was.

He had enjoyed six years of playing totally irresponsible, and he wouldn’t mind bringing that old cartoon charm back someday.

* * *

**December 1999**

It was Sunday and there shouldn’t have been a letter in the mailbox, but there was. As Yakko took in the view from the twentieth floor, the lights turned on all over the city. Fog embraced every mansion on the hills while inside the studio, the rage of years of formidable films and money-desperate mashers, to cartoons you couldn’t forget to ones you wished you could forget, grew into great cognizance the longer he stared at the walls.

Bugs Bunny, _Casablanca_ , _Tiny Toon Adventures_ , Daffy Duck, _Good Fellas_ , Batman.

The big WB seemed to have the Midas touch whenever it came to films, sucking you into the story and having you ride along on the crest of a cinematic wave.

Well, correction, no. There was nothing fair game about that 91-minute brainless tosh of Cindy Crawford screaming and running from one overblown action scene to another, taking the odd breather for showers and changes of clothes. Not that he had too much of a problem with that, though a warning would have been nice from not having to see a Baldwin full moon.

“He’s doing it again.”

“I am not. I’m listening.”

“Oh yeah? Name the fifth thing he said.”

“He only said three words: ‘have a seat.’” Yakko leaned forward and nodded. “I am listening.”

Ruegger sank into his forties like an old armchair. In just moments his mouth gave up on the stoicism his colleagues wanted him to project, breaking into a boyish grin that made the Warners smile back.

He chuckled at their infectious charms and turned his palms out. “I love you guys. You three know why you’re so special?”

Wakko shrugged. “We didn’t teach cartoons _all_ we know about comedy, just most of it?”

Dot pat the back of her hair. “I look like a million dollars, in mink or in negligée?”

“Our unintended success bringing in adult viewers and viewers outside the Kids’ WB target demographic of young children on Saturday mornings?” Yakko guessed.

Ruegger nodded out some encouragement, chuckling inwardly. Yakko joined in his quiet laugh, picking up the tender look in the man’s face. It didn’t end there; it was all in his smile and the turning of his eyes, which were very wide open, making him appear both young and old at the same time.

“Can’t say I expected anything else. You three are Warners, point blank.” Ruegger’s eyes went to his desk and indents of the floor, but then he suddenly seemed to remember who he was meeting with and lifted his head. “You three were way ahead of your time sixty years ago, and you still look it in the face with no fear.”

Yakko shrugged this time. “Tim Curry’s a riot. What can we say?”

Ruegger’s chuckle was not audible a second time, but he broke the pause that followed.

“See, again, I love you guys. Creative,” he directed toward Wakko who broke out in a grin, then glanced at Dot who batted her lashes after he commented, “adorable as hell.”

Yakko was expecting _wiseass_ or _motor-mouth_ , all in good natured mirth, but he took “loyal to family and friends” and wore it like a badge of pride.

“Excellent hosts and entertainers,” Ruegger finished for the entire trio.

How odd to hear all of that but see it come out of half-familiar features.

“All right Rue, am I gonna have to call the paramedics by how much you’re stroking? What was with that letter you sent us?”

Canceling a successful kids show because it had drawn in too many adults and teenagers didn’t sound like it made much sense. Why cancel if people were still watching, the Warners argued. Yakko had been right about that unintended audience shift; _Animaniacs_ brought in a lot of viewers, but not the viewers WB was aiming for. The network didn’t like that kind of pressure or having to rely on leftover scripts and storyboards.

“You know how they say cartoons aren’t for kids?” Ruegger asked. “Well, they needed the show to be some sort of attraction specifically for them. You were solid on Fox Kids, believe you me, but it was all ad revenue from then on guys − with cereal and toy commercials in between.”

So that was it. The unintended results weren’t exactly all to be bragged about. Boy, with how far television had come, Yakko thought kids would break their necks trying to beat their parents to the box before the morning was over. He really wondered when the day would come when advertising and number crunching wouldn’t always be what moved creators’ hands in keeping children happy and occupied on Saturdays. It was no perfect world, but hey, the time spent where he’d be learning a whole script could now be used differently.

Though, in a way, Yakko thought it might be kind of a relief to be finished. He had the chance to start all over again, and he believed he and his sibs were always as good as their potential. He could now live in his work and in a few relationships with the people he could count on. Fame would go by, and, he thought, _so long, I’ve had you fame_.

If it went by, he’d have always known it was fickle. So at least it was something the Warner brothers, and the Warner sister, had experienced.


	2. Pressing Matters

**January 13, 2001**

Sometimes wearing a scarf and a polo coat with no makeup and with a certain attitude of walking, Dot would go shopping or just people-watch on a park bench. She would have her shades and a novel, but there would always be those few sharp teenagers. They’d stop, stare, then they’d start tailing her. Not that she minded too much − at least up until recently. She was safe to toot her own horn; she was successful, attractive and charming, but she’d learnt that toons of any age had their insecurities.

Dot had realized long ago that folks only wanted to see if she was real or not (so to speak) and meant no harm in souring her only day off or giving her a fright when they shouted her name at the grocery store. All of those teenagers, all of their brothers and sisters and their friends they couldn’t wait to call, they didn’t know any better. When they saw her, their faces would light up, as the commonly used simile went, like a Christmas tree.

Just like that, she’d’ve changed their whole day.

“And that has its…you know, its moments.”

Dot’s fingers tapped the microphone stand off-beat to her pulse in her throat. Her memory was no gold mine, but her mind ran like an oil spill. All four of those things were especially valuable and she wasn’t about to let a camera portray her as a rookie. She grew up in front of them, for Pete’s sake!

So the cutie turned in her chair for them to get her good side, smiled out to all of the greasy grinds and hacks with their Bachelor degrees, and only glared for 0.5 seconds when a flash went off. _Can’t show them ugly._

“Those were, well, those are still times when it’s nice. The fame. People knowing who you are and all of that jazz, and feeling that you’ve meant something to them.”

Dot shrugged, smudging up her cheek with her fist as she went for a quick backseat ride in her mind. Back to the simpler times of black-and-white, over to the attractive runaway successes of soundies, and down to the lavish revues of the Ziegfeld Follies.

She shivered at the nauseating wave of nostalgia. Not that thinking of the old times caused her disgust. She just missed them and wished she could have explored even more than she had in certain decades and fall back on being so active during others.

“I don’t know why, but somehow I feel people know that I mean what I do. You know, both when I’m on screen or when I see them in person. Like, I really do mean ‘hello’ and ‘how are you.’”

It was nice to be included in celebrity encounter fantasies, but Dot had to admit she liked it a lot more for being accepted. At least for her own sake. She didn’t look at herself in the mirror as an asset, but she was sure a lot of toons had.

“A lot of folks have, oh gee,” she chuckled, “a lot of folks have real quirky problems they wouldn’t dare want anyone to know about. But one of my problems happens to show. I’m late.”

Dot shrugged again at the scattered laughter. She was an actress, but then nobody’s perfect.

“I’m not into that whole big American rush. You know, where you gotta go and you gotta go fast but for no good reason. I want to be prepared when I get to the set and give a good performance, or whatever to the best of my ability. Sue me! Lots of actors can be on time and do nothing, which I have seen them do, and they all sit around chit-chatting or twiddling their thumbs.”

She paused at the nice warmth the next memory gave her. “I’ll never forget what Fannie Brice said about me: ‘When she’s there, she’s there. All of her is there! She’s there to work.’”

Dot didn’t know how many times she could shrug without her head popping off her shoulders, but then again she didn’t know how many times her agent would keep booking these stupid press conferences when _he_ had no head on his shoulders.

“Next question?”

Ten hands in the back and seven more in the front rose. She gave a sickly-looking termite in the farthest corner a chance.

“Are you comfortable now that you’ve secured initial grounds to discuss contract renewal negotiations with Warner Bros.?”

Dot’s feelings didn’t hide easily on her face. Her discomfort was visible in her brow crease and her full lip down-curve. Mentioning that like there was no show, no _Animaniacs_ to begin with, and acting as if she was just starting out a career stung a lot.

“Nothing’s new. If I want to continue to act, I’ll continue to act. Nothing wrong with going back to the studio that gave me the chance.”

“But recently you have been the only one from the _Animaniacs_ cast to discuss future endeavors with the studio,” a grizzly man shouted upfront. “Did your brothers have concerns about this?”

“Honey, we’ve been together for sixty-plus years in showbiz. We dreamed of a bright future together, rehearsed together, joked about how we were going to make Hollywood famous and not the other way around. Just because we’re family doesn’t mean we have to do and like the same things. One of us could’ve been sick of acting, you never know.”

A mindlessly happy-sounding blue cat raised a notepad. “Any word on whether or not the former cast members will take a chance and reprise their respective roles?”

“Do you believe Spielberg will execute future productions?”

“When you said, ‘one of us could’ve been sick of acting,’ which Warner sibling were you referring to?”

If this were the show, Dot would’ve looked at Camera 1, drawn out some smartass quip while still making it sound cute, and it would iris out and the director would cut, print, and wrap it up. She never thought people would turn against her for resuming activities solo following the cancellation of the show. At least not by themselves they wouldn’t turn.

She liked people. It was the public that scared her.

“To be honest, I’m in no position to say anything about those things. I’ll speak for myself.”

Toons and humans were strange creatures. They had no idea the number of run-ins with raw human nature Dot had encountered over the last five, ten, fifteen years. She didn’t have to say it in front of a vanity mirror that _fame stirred up envy, it truly did_. Strangers she ran into felt that, ‘well, who is she and who does she think she is, Valerie Bertinelli?’

They felt fame gave them some type of privilege to walk up to her and say anything of any nature and it wouldn’t hurt her feelings. The same went for actors or directors she’d worked with in the past. Usually they would take it to the newspapers and magazines instead because that was a bigger play. If they were insulting her to her face, all Dot would have to do was blow a kiss and tell them she’d see them around.

But newspapers and magazines were coast-to-coast canon fodder for idle prattle, all around the world for the public to judge. Dot didn’t want to see another reporter again for the next few weeks. It brought out the ugly sides − nostalgia, worry, perfectionism, sass.

By the time the media had been spoon-fed and she’d made more municipal appearances than she could count, she was finally free. Tired as hell and overdue for a shower, but free.

Under the moonlight the avenue lay still at 11:47. The heat of the day had been replaced by a cool breeze as Dot sauntered under the trees with a peacoat dangling from one arm. She moved between the pools of streetlight, heels almost silent on the sidewalk still wet from a rare rainfall. A pair of headlights came bouncing over the hill, blinding her temporarily before passing and disappearing.

The perfume of the season ending, coupled with the cool of an evening wash, pressed against her hair, washing it in dull red and orange to match the faded colors of porch lights. Dot hurried down the drive towards the eggshell white apartments, climbing the metal steps that led to 623D and practically throwing herself inside a coolly-lit living room.

“What’s that smell?”

“Thirteen minutes to midnight.”

Dot rolled her eyes and tossed her coat into the open mouth of the closet. “Is that new material or are you trying to tell me something?”

“Perhaps.” Hunched over their writing desk by the kitchen, Yakko didn’t even acknowledge her by the eye. “Lavender. Dollar ninety-five per ounce.”

“Again, huh?” Dot glanced over at the stairwell, then around the den, over the island separating the kitchen, and back to the living room. “He cleaned, too?”

“If that’s how he copes, I won’t stop him.” All jokes aside, Yakko peered over his shoulder and pointed a pen up. “Go say hi to him, at least. Or goodnight. Whatever vampire’s running your schedule, I wanna talk with him.”

 _He’s definitely heartless_. Dot kept that to herself.

With no coffee in her system and needing to get up in six hours, it would’ve come out like a moan of misery rather than an amusing rebuttal. She wondered if it was worth taking some Lunesta and risk oversleeping, but as far as her troubles with scheduling went, she couldn’t accede to the forgetfulness and willfully tardy behaviors the media tirelessly charged her with.

 _Tea it is_ , Dot decided, rapping on Wakko’s door. No noise or movement came after the second knock, so she slowly pushed the door in.

From every wall were so many posters of Liverpool Football Club and black-and-white photographs that she wasn’t sure of the paint color behind them anymore. The bed and wardrobe were more central than pushed up against a wall, suggesting some furniture arrangement in the last hour. The air still carried lavender and cedar wood, but there wasn’t a trace of her brother.

“Wakko?”

Dot checked the other rooms on the second floor before circling out back. She found him lounging in one of the general sunrooms of the apartment complex, surrounded by fiery hues and earthy furniture. She knocked quietly on the wall and hopped over the little indent in the floor to cross the room and hug him.

“What’s up in here?”

“Eight minutes to midnight.”

“Are you guys plotting some intervention behind my back, or are you just being funny?”

Wakko shrugged, lazily grinning up at her. “Perhaps.”

Dot mussed his face with his hat and took the adjacent seat by him, noticing a few candles lit and a book leaning off the straw table with a thing of lavender sticking out.

“Things getting a little better? Yakko said you were cleaning earlier.”

“I’m fine.”

“Hey, that’s a woman’s line. Don’t steal it. Unless you want to tell me something, I want to know how you’re feeling. You’re a pain in the ass, but you’re my pain in the ass.”

Wakko shook his head, _tsk_ ing under his breath. “Language, language.” With an easy smile, he grabbed the purple herb bookmark Dot was fiddling with. “No really, I’m fine. Better now, I think. I know when these kinds of spouts are coming. I can feel them,” he added, tapping his temple.

“You can…‘feel them’?” He nodded. “How do you mean?”

“Like I’m waiting on a trailer for a movie, and each time I’m rooting for it and hoping it doesn’t flop.”

Dot could understand Wakko’s penchant for using cinema-type talk around the house to butter things up, but she needed him to stop weaseling out of what he tended to avoid saying as of late. He was sick. Well, not entirely in a clinical way as she thought.

She couldn’t do any personal diagnosis, but she figured it had something to do with how Wakko didn’t like hearing any form of ‘undesirable information,’ whether it was brought up out of the blue or eased into table talk over dinner. It could be as mild as a fender bender on Interstate 10 and he’d instantly step out the room.

Yakko once said he turned so many blind eyes Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles were jealous.

Dot couldn’t argue with not wanting to hear something unfortunate when her day was going just fine, but that was life. It wasn’t perfect. Wakko had to stop bidding so much time and energy in avoiding bad news or it would really make him sick.

“How’s the trailer looking so far?” She asked.

Wakko shrugged. “Pretty boring.”

“That’s a good sign, right?”

“Yeah, it can be. If nothing jumps out when it ends, I’ll be fine. Really,” he insisted when Dot gave him a prodding look. He leaned over to give her knee a pat before settling back on the settee. “You still got your heels on.”

_Wow, I must really be out of it._

Aside from trying to fathom how she hadn’t heard the distinct clicking of her own footwear on the sunroom’s concrete floor, she wondered what had provoked her brother all the way into the evening. Lavender and cedar wood only made appearances when he had trouble sleeping, he had a tic of over cleaning if something spooked him, and he only ever camped out in the sunroom if he was working on something too delicate for criticism just yet.

What the heck was he up to?

“I’ll bring you something cold,” Dot offered after the dragged out silence. She didn’t wait to hear a response or preference as she hopped off her seat and squeezed Wakko’s shoulder on the way to the door, glancing at the clock on her way out.

12:14 a.m. Tea was yesterday’s news. _Coffee it is_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any following chapters without a bolded date in the beginning means that it is still taking place within that month. Some timelines will have a specific date, some just the general month and year. Thanks for reading! 💖


	3. Product of Limbo

“Talent is developed in privacy.”

Yakko didn’t think most people realized this for an actor. The need for solitary, a need for aloneness. Actors had certain kinds of secrets that they’d let the whole world in on for a moment and in one moment only − while they were acting. 

But everybody was always tugging at you. They’d all like a chunk of you. Every weakness was exaggerated the more famous you got.

Yakko could make tons of gags about it, like how studios hadn’t the foreground or even the background to meet somewhere in the middle, but even he knew he couldn’t always make light of the harsh truth.

“Finished,” they basically told him and his siblings the day after Christmas. That got him upset, that brought out his weakness. “Ratings are for kids, too. You didn’t help it. You’ll never be heard of again,” they basically spit in the Warners’ faces.

Yakko hadn’t wanted to read the situation like that, but the way Ruegger had pampered them first and then tried to lay the bad news on a rose bed as if the studio’s most popular toons − toons who catered to adults, twenty-one and older, mature older beings − weren’t mature enough themselves to understand why their show was in danger. Years of writing clever, sneaky and witty content for his characters had leached into his real life speech to skid around his own troubles.

It was strange to think of Ruegger as cautious. The Warners had joked about ratings and censors all the time because of him, and they had gotten by not just because of comedic timing and his brilliant writing, but of true knowledge of what they were blabbing about.

And by a lot of hoping Fox’s trigger finger wouldn’t pull the plug, but he digressed.

Yakko wanted to do a lot of digressing from now on, and that was exactly why he’d woken up a quarter to eight on a Sunday. New white rays shone through the window and curtain just the same on any floor of the building. Sunshine was in everyone’s bones, radiating heat out into the bright day and making people glow while straggling summer winds moved along. Even the birds were silent, and the grass stood still as if too hot to move.

Yakko had the full mind to avoid all of that. Settled in the living room right where he had left off the night before, he was ready to indulge in a bit of writing before the morning was spent.

“Gotta keep my hands busy one way or another,” he had reasoned last week after being hounded by Dot for hogging the only good and clean writing surface in the apartment.

Yeah, he’d heard it when he said it and had gotten a face full of Cola after a glorious spit take from Wakko.

 _Boy, the Fox Censors would’ve had a field day with that one_ , Yakko thought, smirking to himself as he gazed around at one of his many notebooks, tapping the leather-bound covers until stopping on one of them.

Opening it revealed some particularly thick content, from shorthand writing over ten months old down to dog-eared pages too large to be convenient. So much untidy scrawl in one place, so many unfinished thoughts and drunken rants gone unpublished.

He didn’t know if it was selfish or plain idiotic to hanker after the impossible, after a world he could only live in from fictional representation of life back then. The older decades were flammable, but they had shined bright and had had beautiful imperfections that brought him, Wakko and Dot a life modern-Hollywood productions could never invoke.

“Pity.”

Yakko’s initial reaction was to push away from the desk at the voice in his ear, but his arm had a mind of its own and smacked whoever was behind him. His hand hit dead air but the grin on Wakko’s face was livelier than ever.

“Is that why your hands have been so busy? You need to work on your grip.”

“I should smack you for real this time just for saying that.”

Wakko rolled his eyes and nodded to the open book on the desk. “No, that,” he said, pointing out a section of Yakko’s loopy and convoluted handwriting. “Did you stroke out?”

“I wa—”

“Instead of stroking something else that makes you happy?”

Yakko knew his brother saw the look of shock register on his face before he could hide it. As Dot would simply put it, “boys, go fig.”

“You know, not every gag has to come out of the gutter.”

“I was thinking more on the ego stroking side, kind of like what you said to Tom a couple years back.”

_Dammit, if he wasn’t smirking at me._

Now Yakko really wished he had “accidentally” conked Wakko on the noggin. Maybe that would have derailed his train of thought and smart mouth from the double entendre station. But he was pleased to hear a quip not relying on wanton crutches. Sure, a crude joke was one thing when any cartoon showed how it could be done, though he did have a slight issue when it had to be consistently milked out until it was bone dry. It lost its jazz and just made him feel gross.

“What’re you doing up so early?” Yakko asked, eager to change the subject before he lost his mind on another tangent.

Wakko shot him a look on the way to the couch. “What do you mean early? It’s 12:15.”

Now it was. It seemed all their clocks were always a minute or two late to catch up. Or maybe that was just him.

“Wow. Never let me be your agent.”

Yakko looked down at what he had apparently been writing for four and a half hours. Some ramble about the genius of creativity and how the real world drifted away by imagination on one page, the burden of something or another on the next page, and a completely random checklist of all the terrible things Wakko and Dot had read about him, from their first all-musical sound cartoon in the early Thirties towards more serious acting in the television-era of the Fifties.

_Unacceptable quality. Desperately unfunny. Too penetrating to be a recurring character._

All of those interfering bores with no appreciation of animated cartoons had the same thing to say in different ways. Yakko didn’t know why he had to write them down to relive them in the present. The public was scary and dumb, and that was not a good combination.

“Where’s Dot?” Wakko asked, thankfully saving the eldest yet again from his own mind. By the pointed tone of his voice though, it sounded like he’d asked the question more than once.

Yakko shrugged, crossing over to the kitchen and mentally slapping himself for zoning out. He’d work on that.

“Probably halfway to Ontario by now.”

“What’s she doing all the way in Canada?”

“She’s…not in Canada.”

Wakko made a little humming noise. “Ontario County, not bad.”

“Ehhhh, I doubt she’s taking a five-hour flight all the way to New York,” Yakko called over the fridge popping out ice.

“Well she can’t be visiting Onterrio Raymond Lloyd Smith! I never pegged her for the high school football type.”

Yakko returned with no hurry to correct and leaned against the wall, taking an occasional sip of his Screwdriver. The rising quiet made Wakko turn all the way around on the couch to stare right back.

“Don’t let me stop you. I wanna see how long you can stretch this joke out.” When the quiet did the stretching instead, Yakko sighed. “She’s in Ontario, California. You know that city we have here, just southwest of San Bernardino County?”

He could tell Wakko was making the effort to look interested, but seemed bothered as well as unimpressed.

“What’s she doing all the way there?”

Yakko shrugged again. “Most likely more publicity stunts for whatever the studio’s churning out.”

“Isn’t she tired of those by now?”

“I dunno. Why not ask her?”

“I would if I could.” Wakko held a hand out, grasping at the air. It took Yakko a solid minute to realize he wanted a sip from his glass. “She’s always going to bed when we wake up.”

Yakko swapped places with the wall and propped himself up by the couch, handing over the juice. “C’mon, don’t exaggerate. It makes you look bad.”

“To who?”

Wakko took a big gulp like Yakko knew his typical little brother would whenever he wanted something he was eating or drinking, but he didn’t expect him to let out an even bigger hack just to spit the beverage back into the cup.

“Where’s this _been_?” He gagged out, violently wiping his tongue on his sleeve.

“I can tell you where it’s gonna be,” Yakko rebut, cocking a thumb towards the kitchen. “Go make me another before I make you brush your teeth and drink it all.”

He went back for his notebook, wet the end of a pencil, and waited until he heard the soft squeak of the couch and Wakko’s grumbling to grow distant to start writing again. He was going to set about doing it coherently for maybe half an hour and dropping the extra four off his shoulders. Yakko started crossing out various items that didn’t make a lick of sense and turned some pages just to entertain himself in guessing what he had been on.

He knew he must have been on a fever high when he spotted:

_**“September 12, 1983.”** _

_Gregory Nuss has the crouch of a lackey. He was brought up by a single mother and after leaving school, he took a holiday and never returned home. He married in haste. When he lost his leg in a freak elevator incident, Gregory bought a house in Jersey. Now he faces eviction._

Yakko couldn’t believe he’d written the first draft of a teleplay, which was unreadable at this point, almost seventeen years ago. He was going to snap his neck by hard how he was cringing and promptly slammed the notebook shut.

“No wonder that orange juice tasted foul! You put vinegar in it!”

The corner of Yakko’s mouth twitched into his cheek as he snickered. Wakko was too well-meant for his own good.

“Leave it alone! I’m sure Dot’ll want me to make her something with it when she gets back.” He heard Wakko gagging again, but his ears picked up a little jab afterwards that sounded like it had their sister’s name in it, followed by something about Ontario. “Remember what I said? Don’t exaggerate. She didn’t get to choose her schedule.”

“She got to choose her agent.”

 _He got me there._ “Not the point. If she’s got an issue, she’ll bring it up with him. She’s going back to the screen after a year of silence.”

Wakko let out a wry whistle. “What a nail-biting hiatus.”

“Hey, hey, she’s doing her best. If she really wants this, don’t you think we should cut her some slack?”

Silence.

“Hello? Did we get disconnected?”

Dial tone.

Whatever Wakko was thinking about or trying not to think about, Yakko would let him be. For now. He leaned his head on the backrest of the chair, placed a notebook over his eyes, and lost himself to the old book smell. For his younger brother’s sake, he hoped he would set his tone straight and use his words soon.

Before he got a bad call.


	4. Pushing Buttons

Wakko used to get a feeling, and sometimes he still got it, that sometimes he was fooling somebody. He didn’t know who or what, maybe himself. He’d always felt that towards the slightest scene on _Animaniacs_ with him in it, even if all he had to do was pop out and say “hello,” that the people ought to get their money’s worth and that it was his obligation to give them the very best.

He had especially gotten those feelings on days when there’d be scenes with a lot of responsibility on his part. He would wish he had an ease of delivery like Yakko or could point up the eye values on camera like Dot. Sitting on the apartment steps in the warm breeze of a January morning, remembering when he first got the teleplay for _Wakko’s America_ or sat down with Paul Rugg for skits like “Potty Emergency” or “Go Fish,” Wakko started shaking.

He figured all actors went through it; a struggle with shyness more than anyone could imagine. It was like a censor inside that warned them, to a certain degree, what they could let go and do. People probably thought the Warners had gone out to the lot and in one take, that was it. Lights, camera, action. Perfection. Now Wakko didn’t think he was one of the world’s most self-conscious toons, but he really had to work hard with so many other funny competitors on TV.

Sometimes even against the main two competitors by his side.

Wakko had grown with the schtick of the troublesome “middle kid syndrome” Warner people grew to adore and he loved what was created over the years. His character, that was what he loved. The stunts and incredible scores by Rogel and Stone, that was what he lived for. Spending time wreaking havoc on the Warner movie lot…

“Any more tea and we’ll have to buy powdered wigs.”

Wakko blinked, realizing he had the kettle boiling for the fifth time that morning, filled to the brim and wired with caffeine. He didn’t remember when he stepped inside and busied himself getting cups and tea bags ready for a party of zero − now a party of one whenever Yakko had come into the kitchen. The brothers weren’t that big on the drink, but they knew Dot needed her usual fix every once in a while.

If she were home, Wakko didn’t know if she’d thank him or slap him for overdoing it.

“At least we’ll have our health,” he pointed out, quickly taking the pot off the stove eye and turning the heat off. “Can’t believe Dot’s been gone for almost a week.”

“Yep, a working girl,” Yakko said distractedly without looking up from the paper.

“You think she’ll ever come back in one piece?”

“She’s not off to war, Wak. You know how long it takes to shoot just one scene. Let alone a movie.”

“She’s doing a movie?”

“Could be.”

Wakko shrugged, pouring the hot water down the sink and wiping the counters along the way. He had since pushed the thought of breakfast away, knowing there was no way he could swallow a bite, let alone a whole plateful, when his entire mind was full. A movie, huh? He wished Dot a ton of luck.

He remembered those mixed reactions after “his” movie’s release. Some he didn’t like thinking about, others he couldn’t ignore when it came through fan mail or magazines shoved in their mailbox. The comments had been clamoring on top of one another, going on and on about “why so serious,” are the “Warners constraining their lunacy,” how odd for “a series known for its off-the wall humor.”

Wakko didn’t think the movie had been all that serious, and aside from the country hopping, thin sleeping schedules, and a buttload of singing, he fell in love with the end result. Besides, what movie could brag about having every single cast member return for one last ride with the same writers, producers, and directors?

Whatever movie Dot was going for, Wakko wanted to give her his best wishes.

“Did she say how long she was going to be gone?” He asked after clearing the Boston Tea Party out their kitchen.

Still distracted by whatever was in the news, Yakko barely moved an inch when Wakko reached over to take out the Entertainment section.

“Another twelve days or so,” he managed to answer.

“Sheesh!”

“Hey, that’s showbiz, remember? I’d be more concerned if she needed to be gone for two days.”

Wakko hummed under his breath, trying to swallow a bittersweet pill that had suddenly lodged in his throat. He actually coughed hard enough to send the room spinning, now wishing he hadn’t poured out that kettle so hastily. Then again, he had a feeling tea would be the bare minimum of a distraction and that whatever gunk Yakko had put in his orange juice last Sunday would be what he really needed.

It had been more than a few days since his last trailer, as he called them. Wakko honestly didn’t know what else to call those little episodes ( _episodes_ , he’d make a note of that), but relating them to the film business made him feel a lot better than those ugly words Scratchansniff usually used.

Ailment. Bug. Condition.

Wakko was starting to kick himself for sharing his troubles with someone so medically astute and vocal. Scratchy was a triple threat − their chaperone, their actual psychiatrist, and their guardian. Not that he, Yakko or Dot had needed any of those things on the lot to begin with. They’d been allowed on and off the set, they weren’t that crazy, and they had each other.

Wakko didn’t mind the man, but when he started using all that fancy p-psychiatrist gab and picking apart his brain like he was eleven, that was where he drew the line.

_I’m not sick._

“I never said you were.”

Wakko jumped at the sound of Yakko’s voice. Either he had said those thoughts out loud or they were broadcast straight across his forehead. Whatever it was had caused the eldest to give him a certain look over the newspaper. Wakko tried smiling his way out of it, going so far as to bat his eyes, but Yakko wasn’t typecast as the most talkative, witty, and well-read for nothing.

“Something is rotten in the state of California.” He turned in his chair, legs crossed and fingers still intertwined on the newspaper. He spared one finger to gesture forward though, like a parent beckoning to a child. “C’mon Wakko, give it to me.”

Wakko blinked, not meaning to sound like he was playing dumb by asking, “Give you what?”

Yakko narrowed his eyes. “The dish.”

“They’re all drying.”

“You know what I mean. What’s on your mind that’s got you talking to yourself?”

“What made you think anything’s ever on my mind?” Record scratch, rewind, take two. “Er, I meant…whatever made you think anything’s on my mind?”

“Guess that’s one way of putting it,” Yakko muttered, shaking his head. “I know for a fact you’re thinking of something.”

“What makes you say that?”

After those five words, it was for five seconds that Wakko was convinced his little trailers/episodes came with hallucinating. Newspaper nowhere to be seen and several spreadsheets now in his hands, Yakko leaned forward in some shabby business suit, elbows on the kitchen table and a stern “let’s review, shall we” making him look and sound like TP.

The random visual was, thankfully, not a creative warning saying Wakko seriously needed a doctor but a creative way of getting something out of him. He preferred zany transitions and outfit swaps like that on television, not when he was about to get some chatty AA-styled lecture.

“On Sunday just after 12:45 p.m., you displayed sporadic fits of silence all day − with the accompaniment of Otherland candles in the living room and the hall bathroom. Not quiet, silence. Following into the evening, making it two nights in a row, I found you occupying that sunroom like it was your own private penthouse. This morning at approximately 7:30 you were on the apartment steps, letting the newspaper read you rather than the other way around, before you eventually worked our kettle to death two hours later.”

Wakko slouched in the chair, every muscle giving into gravity as his babbling brook of a brother blabbed on. _Could never say that three times fast._ He felt he should have found the cartoon-esque play out amusing. Maybe that would have eased him into giving a definite answer.

But it just reminded him of another insultingly long and anal session with Scratchansniff. And he didn’t need another one in the middle of the week.

“So again, I reiterate,” Yakko wrapped up, the business wittiness gone and the _L.A. Times_ back in his hands, “what’s on your mind?”

Something was in Wakko’s chest, just sitting there, waiting to take over in his brain and bounce him towards an uneasiness he didn’t need. _Here comes a flop_.

“Just thinking of Dot. I miss her.”

It wasn’t too far from the truth, but certainly not within walking distance of what was really grabbing him by the tongue and drying up his mouth.

“I get it.”

 _That worked?_ Wakko yanked his hat down, hoping there wouldn’t be another bulletin flash. Yakko wasn’t scrutinizing him as much anymore, so his thoughts were finally off air.

“You do?”

“Sure. It’s that older brother complex. We can’t help keeping an eye on her.”

“Yeah, well…”

Wakko leaned forward with his chin propped on his knee and stared at the forgotten black-and-white print he had grabbed earlier. It was hardly what he’d call entertaining and could already feel his focus drifting. He found more entertainment in the lime green numbers on the oven’s clock.

“You wanna do something tonight?”

“Like what?”

“Try to take over the world?”

That did the trick of getting Yakko’s attention again, even if only for a couple seconds. “Sure pal. I’ll roll out the blueprints,” he chuckled. “Why don’t you find a movie for us?”

Wakko thought for a moment, then with his trademark tongue-out-the-corner-of-his-mouth, suggested, “ _Chill Factor_?”

For a hot minute, the only noise that responded was the hum of the frigidaire and the faint creak of the apartment settling. Yakko gave him a concerningly slow onceover, folding the newspaper at an even slower pace. Right on cue with that toon disposition:

“Didn’t you hear me? I said a movie.”


	5. March Forward

**March 9, 2001**

Yakko believed in reincarnation, and if he could come back as anyone or anything, he would want to be a flower. It wasn’t much of a thought, in the grandiose sense of the word, but there was nothing more perfect to him than five, six, seven petals with a sunshine yellow middle. The colors and scents were drug-like, and his brain always buzzed, happy and serene, even if he couldn’t afford the time to stop and appreciate them.

And he refused to buy the wax imitations. Nothing was as comforting to him as the real deal.

The parlor air was mostly perfumed by the heaviness of lilies, orchids, and carnations, striking against the backdrop of stone walls. On closer inspection Yakko could see that their stamens had been removed, and reaching out to poke one, he felt the wet and coolness seep through his gloves. He knew this would be the last time he could enjoy these flowers.

After today they would forever remind him of the goodbye he had to say come April.

“So he’s really gone?”

Yakko looked over at Dot. She sat on one of the bench settees with her legs drawn up, frown taut and a slight tremor in her cheek. When her eyes fell on him, her head lolled in the palm of her hand as if overcome with a great weariness for the answer.

He gave a single nod. “Yeah.”

Dot’s eyes fell to the cold floor, fingers tapping the cushions beneath her and then going to pluck at some stray thread in her sweater. Yakko stole a look over at Wakko. He sat heavily with all the grace of a sack of wet cement on the settee opposite Dot, practically conforming into the shape of the seat and seeming to fall into it. He was chewing his bottom lip, eyes everywhere but on the flowers.

Wakko had already been low on energy prior to the news, and even at the start of the month had found some weird remedies in staring at nothing or going through their archaic photographs and scrapbooks in the middle of the night. As much as he wanted to, Yakko hadn’t pushed anything out of him. Wakko wasn’t hurting anybody, and the way he de-stressed wasn’t a cause for alarm or berating. But after Randy’s phone call, Yakko doubted this type of silence had its doctorate.

“Penny for your thoughts?” He asked.

Wakko pushed his mouth into an awkward smile, but his cheeks weren’t so compromising. Yakko could see the reluctance.

“How about for a nickel?” Dot joined in.

Something Yakko thought was a chuckle and what sounded like “eh” puffed out Wakko’s mouth, but that was about it. He wasn’t budging. When he turned away on the settee, neither sibling needed to see his entire face to know it had fallen lifeless again. Yakko sighed, not at his brother’s quiet but at the situation they were all in.

Stone had been a low-key kind of guy, so his relationship with the toons he had worked with wasn’t as advertised. He hadn’t paraded around his status in front of people like John Hughes or Maurice Jarre when he’d first worked with them throughout the late 80s, and he had been dealt such a good hand in the 90s with the revival of Warner Bros. animation it was impossible to _not_ feel like you had to bow in front of him and kiss his feet.

But he would just smile and wave, give his thanks, and keep on moving. The guy made humble pie look conceited.

The few times in the Fall Yakko had gotten to be in private with Stone − or as private as a television set could get − was always to inquire when he’d be writing a song in Dot’s key for once, or to see if he had ever passed along the message to that cute trombonist to see if she really had lungs of steel. Yakko hadn’t always explained how “she’s a good singer off set,” or really he couldn’t, because he’d be laughing at Stone’s stunned face each and every time he’d phrase it differently.

 _A magic mouth_ , _the chic had rhythm with her hands_ , _a girl who could really blow_.

Sharing comments like that would have either gotten the toon dodging the composer’s baton in places a baton should never hit, or had him smirking at the “promises” that with a mouth like that, Stone would find a way to make singing all the words in the English language sound attractive and stick Yakko with the lines.

September was always his chattier months.

It was hard to imagine The Great Stonini gone. Just like that − gone. Nobody had had this gloriously large affiliated friendship with him, but he was no stranger to the toon world. If you didn’t know him, that was okay. You soon would and you’d never forget it. For someone so animated, spirited, and one smart-aleck chatterbox, Yakko not knowing what to say or do was extremely rare.

He was abruptly startled out of his thoughts by an incessant tugging at his pants. He really had to work on blanking out, especially in public. At a time like this it could be warranted, but he knew how irritating it was to repeat oneself or lose yourself in a tangent.

Shaking his head before he did it again, he glanced down. “Yeah?”

“Are you gonna be okay?” Dot asked in a quiet voice.

Yakko didn’t know what his face looked like, but it must’ve been pretty bad if his sister was practically whispering. “You want the honest answer?” When she nodded, he gave a limp little shrug. “I don’t know.”

Probably not the answer Dot wanted to hear, but it was an answer nonetheless. And an honest one. Yakko wasn’t the most sensitive of the Warners, and he tried not to show too many emotions around them other than his usual laidback, sarcastic, motormouth self. Not that he was apathetic or thought he was too macho and that he had to bottle up his feelings so he wouldn’t look weak. He wasn’t stupid.

It just took a lot for him to get angry and a whole lot more to get him crying. Hearing of Stone’s passing, well… He was pretty upset. Not quite the tear-jerking, uncontrollable sobbing mess upset, but that didn’t mean he was heartless if he wasn’t immediately shedding some tears. He knew his mind and body well enough to determine there would definitely be tears at the service. Maybe even a few when they had all picked out their flowers.

Dot was tugging his pants again. She lowered her voice even more that Yakko had to lean down to hear what she’d asked. “You think Wakko’s gonna be okay?”

Yakko followed where Wakko had moved to. He was staring at a full bouquet of deep red chocolate cosmos, and beside them was a vase piled high with orange roses tied at the stems with purple ribbons. Yakko’s mouth actually fell open a bit, not expecting dinner party centerpieces to be a popular choice at a funeral parlor.

“We may have to give him some space,” he finally said after forcing himself to look away. All of those colors were giving him a headache. “You know how big a fan he was of his work. I already know he’s going to lock himself in the sunroom with music, of all things, to cope.”

“Can’t hurt.” Dot shrugged this time and leaned against the wall, eyes back to the floor. “Hell, I might listen to some music when we get home. Cancer’s a bitch.”

Yakko draped an arm around her shoulders, giving one pat out of sympathy and one pat to sway her away from that casual cussing. It just didn’t sound cute from her. She sounded too…sophisticated. Too suburban.

Even that quick little gag from “Cutie and the Beast” where they had all been told to purposely flub their lines and Dot broke into a colorful profane storm with those comical censor beeps, she had sounded odd because she had actually been swearing. Hearing her own sailor’s mouth when she was just supposed to be babbling gibberish for the editors to bleep out had got her cussing even faster for her carelessness. That one take alone had lasted seven minutes but was trimmed down for obvious reasons.

If Yakko hadn’t been on his toes and commented on his “cute little sister who said that,” he wasn’t sure if they would’ve kept it.

“These are nice.”

Yakko looked over at the quiet of Wakko’s voice. It was the first real sentence he’d heard in the last 72 hours, so that had to be a good sign. He and Dot joined his side in front of one of the shelves, the literal red and orange eyesores still holding his attention. _No, uh-uh, no way._ Yakko really hoped he wasn’t about to be roped into buying either one of them.

Dot smiled. “I like them.”

_Dammit._

“I think they’re the newest ones in stock,” Wakko pointed out, reaching up to take a flower and get a closer look.

“You don’t say,” Yakko muttered, glancing around at all the white petals.

The only other color that was making any kind of noise were the lighter pinks and pale yellows of the mums and gladiolus. The flowers in front of them were heavy metal screaming, they were so bright.

“They are pretty,” he had to admit, then he shook his head. “But I’m not sure they’d be suitable for, you know, this kind of setting.”

Wakko furrowed his brows, looking both confused and offended. “Why not? You just agreed that they were pretty.”

“True, but that doesn’t exactly mean—”

“Besides, wouldn’t it be nice to get away from all the white that’s going to be there?”

“And black,” Dot muttered, crossing her arms. Her little dimpled grin juxtaposed her complaint as she turned it into a harmless joke with her next tone. “The one time you guys say it’s okay for me to wear a little black dress and it’s for a different occasion.”

Yakko chuckled and looked down with a jiving smirk. “And we better not see so much as a knee, young lady.”

“Or an ankle,” Wakko added, shaking his finger and getting Dot to blink more than once.

“Wrong…wrong century, you know that, right?”

“Oh, I know. But keep them covered anyway. They give me the creeps.”

Dot pulled his hat around and yanked it over his eyes. “Your whole face gives me the creeps.”

“Going for seven-year-old jabs?” Wakko asked with a creeping smirk.

Dot held up both four-fingered hands and lightly curled them into fists. “Yup, and they’re turning eight today.”

Yakko fit the side of his face in his glove, shaking his head in wonder at their temperament. Just three hours ago they were reasonably disinclined to hop on the bus and shop for funeral flora. Not even twenty minutes into browsing were they now trading verbal blow after blow. All that was missing was the usual music stingers after every other movement, maybe some pies to start flying and a brief fight cloud, and you wouldn’t know the difference between a cartoon and just another Friday for the Warners.

Yakko was pleased to hear Wakko speaking more than two words, and to see that Dot wasn’t too discouraged by grief made him breathe a little easier. But maybe someplace else would have been more appropriate to start being so loud. The proprietor had long since stopped to stare at them, and he wasn’t looking as welcoming anymore.

“Children, inside voices please,” Yakko warned, knowing some physical drollery was high in the air. He didn’t need to be kicked out or banned from a funeral parlor, of all places. “Come on, we came here for a reason.”

Hands clasped behind his back, Wakko nodded up to a shelf. “Are we getting the red ones then?”

“And the orange roses?” Dot added, copying her brother’s posture.

Yakko had already snuck a few glances to check out the prices in the time the two had started showing their ages. They were nothing to sneeze at − heck, even the dollar signs on the more traditional ones made him cringe − but doing so made him feel slightly selfish. He was really worrying about expenses when their head composer had just passed away. That wasn’t right.

Even if sticking with traditions would have saved them the hassle of picking specific kinds and they’d be better off just getting some orchids, Yakko had to agree with Wakko. He could just see how identical all the flowers would be at the memorial in April, right down to the shade of paint on the iron sprays. But everyone would know which one was the trio’s right away; whereas every other petal was a single color, theirs would be a riot of blooms in every shade.

“Why stop at red and orange? We’ll throw in some yellow while we’re at it.”

Richard Stone had always given the Warners a colorful sendoff. He deserved the same.


	6. Pillow Fort and TV Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As of 03/1/21, “Good On Paper” has been moved to Chapter 9. This is a rewritten and renamed version of Chapter 7, “Up To The Mark,” that has been moved back to fall in line with the timeline after “March Forward.”

Dot had always wondered what kind of flower they’d given her to tie her ears up when _Animaniacs_ first aired. She never thought to ask, the stylists had never told her, and nobody seemed to care what she did or what she had to wear in order to stand out.

Over time it had become just another hairband lost on her dresser or swept under her bed, but sometimes she’d give it another go and wear it around the house for old time’s sake. Dot didn’t know why all of a sudden she was pondering its specific plant family at two in the morning. Her thumb ran over the slightly worn petals and bits of the white elastic band underneath. She was smiling, but her eyes were wet and she felt like she’d swallowed a bucketful of sand.

She gazed around her unlit bedroom, ignoring the sudden uptick in her heartbeat at being alone in the dark, and in doing so stole a glance at the white lace around her canopy curtains. It reminded her of all the white flowers from the parlor.

Flowers they had picked out for the memorial service.

_“So he’s really gone?”_

Dot’s own words from earlier echoed in her head. She had never been to a memorial before. What were they like? What was going to happen to her emotions when she and her brothers showed up in April? Her heart beat faster at who was going to be attending. Co-stars? Family and friends only? Was it going to be in the news like most celebrity passings? It kind of hurt to think their composer hadn’t really held high celebrity status and that nobody outside of Burbank would realize he was gone. It was going to be depressing, Dot just knew it. People were going to be crying and nobody would be able to comprehend what had happened.

She still couldn’t.

_“Who was that?”_

_“Randy.”_

_“Randy?”_

_“Wait, like, our Randy? Randy Rogel?”_

Dot ran her fingers along her former flower headwear, wishing she could still hold onto that leisure feeling when her agent had called, informing her that the studio had some ‘things’ to sort out and she would be staying home for a while. She had been none the wiser and now hated the feeling for making her so happy and excited to relax on the couch for a change.

_“Aw, what a sweetheart. What’d he have to say?”_

_“Did you already hang up? Can we call back and say hi?”_

_“He only called to spread the word, sibs. Rich passed away this morning.”_

Dot supposed even that sort of news wasn’t worth beating around the bush. Yakko had ripped the bandaid clean off, and though she and Wakko had been asked if they wanted to attend the service, just send flowers, both or neither, hours later it still left a bruise. A couple tears escaped Dot’s eyes followed by her cheek meeting the pillow.

“He’s not suffering anymore. He’s okay now. He’s gone but not forgotten,” she whispered to her flower piece.

She focused on those tiny four petals alone, letting that calm her and having her quiet words be her sort of lullaby as her eyes got wetter. She was going to get some sleep, she was. If it lasted an hour or twenty minutes, she would welcome it. She would enjoy her few days off, even if it meant staying in bed all day and listening to nothing but the radio.

“Dot?”

“I’m sleeping.”

She wiped her face at the sound of her door opening a little wider and the soft padding of feet on her carpet. The side of her bed caved in slightly as Wakko rested his elbows beside her.

“You’re doing a pretty bad job of it,” he teased.

“I know. What do you want?”

“Okay, so I may have been sleepwalking or dreaming about it. Probably neither. Come downstairs with me real quick.”

Dot turned her back on him. “Whatever you broke, hide it under the couch and blame it on an earthquake.”

“I didn’t break anything. Please come downstairs with me?”

“No.”

“Please? Pretty please?”

 _Ugh._ Wakko had to understand that just because Dot couldn’t close her eyes at the moment didn’t mean she was going to leave her bed. If she had to stay up and lose sleep, she’d stay under the covers to do it. But by the tone of his voice and how soft his pleases got, Wakko was really trying to beg his way into getting her up. Dot didn’t doubt for a second that he was pulling some sort of puppy-dog eye.

 _Now I know how it feels_ , she thought with a sad smile as she reached over to poke Wakko’s nose and ease him backwards.

“Ask Yakko.”

“I don’t want to wake him.”

“So it’s okay to wake your sister instead? What’s the difference?”

“You’re a girl, for one, and the fact that I can do this.”

Dot’s scoff transitioned into a startled gasp when she felt Wakko’s arms clamp around her waist. The covers slid to the side as she was dragged from the bed and out into the hallway.

“Wakko, let go or I will bite you.”

He rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “No, you won’t. You like being carried.”

“You’re not exactly carrying me, Fabio Lanzoni.”

“I can’t put you over my shoulder. I’m going down the stairs.”

Dot shrugged. “I guess. Safety first or what—”

“You weigh as much as the food you sneak out the fridge. I’d break my back the minute you were on me.”

Dot bit Wakko’s arm, as formerly threatened, without hesitation, prompting him to bite her right back and chase her down into the living room. She tried keeping her giggles at a low volume but couldn’t resist letting out a slightly louder laugh when he caught her by the waist again and tickled her stomach.

“Just say uncle,” Wakko laughed out, tickling her faster.

“Never! I’m not giving you the—” Dot did a double take towards the couch and gripped his hand without looking. She ignored the yelp she had caused and pointed. “Why is the TV on and what is that by the coffee table?”

“You’ll see.”

Wakko grabbed one end of a blanket tucked into the corner of the couch and put the other side in Dot’s hands, jutting a thumb towards whatever the towering silhouette was. The only rebuttal she had for it was a suspicious raise of the eyebrow.

“Don’t tell me you slept-walked or dreamt up some kind of marathon binge,” she said, absentmindedly holding up the blanket at the silent command to.

Wakko chuckled. “Maybe.”

“You’re an idiot. It’s two in the morning.”

“So? You’re up, too.”

“Yes, to tell you that you are an idiot.”

Wakko immediately smiled. It was a miracle Dot hadn’t strangled him yet. She stood in the middle of the semi-dark living room, hair a mess and eyes probably still red, as she helped finish whatever Wakko had started building at who knows what time of the night. Why he had decided to wake only her and not Yakko, or why he hadn’t decided to go get him so he could join them, was anyone’s guess. Dot would be lying if she said she wasn’t the least bit curious (and flattered) to see what Wakko wanted exclusively with her.

“You’re lucky I don’t have to be up in the morning,” she told him, yawning into her palm.

“What’s a half hour to spare going to hurt?”

“My already-lacking sleep schedule.”

Dot watched Wakko speed back and forth from the linen closet to the small space in front of her while she made herself comfortable on the couch. She still wasn’t entirely sure what he was up to, didn’t feel like asking anyway, and soon could feel herself nodding off at every other dull pitch about medicine and documentaries coming up next from the TV.

Two white circles suddenly bounced off the living room walls. A harsh, half-stifled yell flew out of Dot’s mouth faster than she could catch herself from both cursing and tumbling off the couch when those same lights bolted into her face.

“Wakko!”

“The flashlights want you to watch what you say, too,” he teased, sticking his tongue out.

“You know where you can stick them?” Dot growled under her breath, rubbing the cloud-like spots from her vision. She jumped to her feet, dusting off her nightgown and asking a little louder, “What is all this?”

“Pillow fort.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

Dot’s lowered eyebrows and squint around the temporary blindness told her what she already knew. It was going to be a long and weird night. She said no more and joined Wakko’s side when he patted an empty spot inside the tilting pillow fort. Their portable radio was also there, softly spilling out late-night classics from the 60s while the floor was coated in a single blanket spread out under pillows.

Dot leaned back on her hands while Wakko got comfortable on his stomach. The brightness of the television cut to black after the final infomercial and faded into an even brighter title card that had Dot squinting all over again. It looked like something in front of a field of flowers, in some kind of meadow or park. Then people started talking, or more like crooning over someone, and she covered her eyes.

“Oh God, no,” she muttered.

Wakko was laughing even before the song had begun. “What?”

“Turn it off. Why would you have this on?”

“I didn’t know this segment would be playing. What, you don’t want to sing your favorite song for me?”

Dot smacked the hand trying to tickle her again. “No.”

Her voice played back to her over the flowery orchestra, making her slowly peek through her fingers and groan. Seeing herself in a rerun behind a soft and dainty glow felt like an out of body experience, and hearing how merry and carefree she had sounded seven years ago kind of made her envious of 90s-Dot Warner. She still looked and relatively sounded the same, but there was something about that 90s aesthetic that she couldn’t perfectly emulate if she tried.

“Can I start over again and ask why you have me up at two a.m. inside a pillow fort watching Nickelodeon?”

Wakko shrugged. “You’re just going to get the same answer in the form of a question.”

“Fine.” Dot hugged her knees, watching her screen self prance around for a little longer. “Then I’ll take ‘Siblings’ for two hundred.”

“Oh?” Wakko gazed off to the side, brows furrowing in concentration, then glanced up with a tongue-out grin. “Okay. The answer is, ‘something people like and something I should probably have right now.’”

“What is a bath?” Dot giggled at the offended scowl, taking time to gently climb on top of Wakko and squeeze him into a hug. “I’m kidding. I think I know what you need. I needed one, too.”

Wakko blinked up at her. “You?”

“Hey, just because you haven’t seen me crying my eyes out or being sappy all day doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings.”

The pair fell silent, their only source of noise to distract them being the Pink Floyd single on the radio or Dot’s enthusiastically-sung proclamation of how cute she was. Wakko looked from the TV, down to the carpet, then up at Dot.

“Have you been crying?”

The question threw Dot’s previous defense off guard, and from Wakko’s perspective, her silence followed by a slow scratch of her arm was all he needed. She fiddled with the hem of her nightgown next and flicked her bangs to the side.

“A little,” she hesitated to admit. “I guess it all caught up to me tonight. I was crying a bit before you came into my room. I started thinking about the flowers we got today.”

“Aren’t you glad we got something pretty?”

“Yeah.” Dot’s smile was as limp as the second huff she breathed out to get her hair out of her eyes. “You have good taste.”

“He deserved something nice. He was a great guy. The best,” Wakko corrected himself with a firm nod.

“Uh-huh.” When her song finally ended and the credits began rolling, Dot switched on a flashlight and shut off the TV. “I never asked. How are you holding up after…all of this?”

“Don’t know. You?”

“Pretty okay.”

They went quiet for another minute, awkwardly entertaining themselves by either fidgeting with their pajamas or poking at the blanketed walls. Dot shrugged to no one in particular and laid down on her side to make bunny ears in the small beam of light. Wakko eventually rolled onto his back and shined the second flashlight up to the ceiling, slowly waving it back and forth.

“You think Yakko’s doing okay?” He asked quietly.

Dot shrugged again. “He might not want to talk about it.”

“How come?”

“He just doesn’t talk about stuff like this.”

“Oh.” Wakko followed wherever he let his flashlight roam, soon growing bored and covering it with his hand. “You think he’ll cry at the memorial?”

Dot gave another shrug. She really didn’t know, and if she was being honest with herself, she kind of hoped he wouldn’t. Yakko had only ever cried once and that was during her famous “death” scene from Wakko’s movie. And he hadn’t been acting. She remembered how many retakes it had taken to get a decent shot, and how bad the weather had been on everyone, and how some of the staff hadn’t let him in on the fact that Dot hadn’t actually been in the way of the harmless canon blast.

She had played the part a little too well, all crumbled and deep in the snow, and nearly sent Yakko into a full-blown panic. The movie alone was one reason why she didn’t like seeing her big brother cry.

“I’ll probably cry,” Wakko spoke up. Dot looked his way, tilting her head to the side. “I might. I dunno. We’ll see.”

“I don’t know if I will,” Dot confessed quietly. “I think I got it all out tonight, but I just don’t know. I’m kind of nervous for April. What’ll we do?”

“Cry if we can, bring our flowers, and…”

Wakko trailed off a little too long for Dot’s liking, and she softly shook his shoulder to get him on track again. He said nothing more, silently shaking his head and resting his chin on the pillow.

“Wakko, you know you can talk to Yakko about how you feel, too, right?”

Dot didn’t know whether the head shake meant that he didn’t know or that he didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t push it, she didn’t say another word, and she didn’t even ask if he needed another hug.


	7. Small Boy, Big Thoughts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As of 03/1/21, this is a rewritten and renamed version of Chapter 8, “Direction is Key.” It has been moved back to fall in line with the timeline after “Pillow Fort and TV Talk.”

Wakko lied. He did want to talk to Yakko and tell him how he was feeling, especially after jolting awake in a cold sweat with his teeth clenching painfully tight and his hands blurring in place.

His eyes, teary and dilated in alertness, jumped to the side in case the sudden movement had woken Dot. His shoulders sagged in relief and a tiny smile popped up when he saw that one, she had actually stayed with him instead of sneaking back to her room, and two, she was sound asleep. The thought of waking her came to mind and was seconded by the idea of telling her about the unprompted night terror that was relentlessly fueling his speed-of-light pulse.

But then Wakko would feel guilty.

Why did Dot have to lose sleep, too? He was pretty sure she had to be up in a while anyway, doing whatever she was used to on studio grounds, and even though they had shared some laughs and a nice talk, he still felt responsible for literally dragging her out of bed.

Wakko’s body shook as he leaned over to place a kiss in between Dot’s ears, froze when they flicked at the touch but didn’t prompt her to wake up, and then shook incredibly fast all over again as he crawled off the pillows and blankets to get a glass of water. It didn’t calm him, nor did chugging from the milk carton, the juice pitcher, and eating the stray granola bar he’d found with the flashlights earlier.

It made his bladder full, but that was it. Now Wakko was wide awake, had nothing to do, and the silhouette of the pillow fort in the dark only punched at his previously pounding heart. Why did he think that was a good idea again? If his memory was as finicky as his focus, he definitely would’ve put himself in the hospital.

“Pull yourself together, Wakko,” he muttered, slapping his cheeks and thinking to himself, _you certainly are whacko._ “It’s okay. You’re okay, and you didn’t wake Dot or Yakko.”

Flashes of the bad dream interrupted his train of thought. Wakko couldn’t remember the details, and he was so angry at his brain that it was deciding right now, when he was trying to figure out how it had all started, to stall the memories of what he had dreamt up in the first place.

He knew he shouldn’t even be awake in the first place. He should have tried going back to sleep when he first woke up hours ago, not throwing together whatever blankets could prop up in the living room and seeing what could entertain him enough to make him tired again. The sunroom had already seen enough of Wakko and heard him crying once they had come back from the funeral parlor.

Now the bathroom was getting the exact same thing.

A deep gasp forcibly rolled out of Wakko’s mouth when his stomach flipped and his head spun. He almost forgot where he was and gripped the sink to steady his shaking legs. It scared him how hard and sudden he was crying, and just the thought of doing something to keep the noise down frustrated him.

He could cry. He was allowed to cry. He didn’t want to wake anybody, but he could cry.

Wakko’s mouth, cheeks, and jaw all sunk from the gloomy weight he constantly fought against. He stared sightlessly into the darkness, towards the mirror where a darker form of himself stared back, and gave his conscience as much time as he wanted to let everything out. He stumbled through the living room at the stroke of 4:45 a.m., running into the couch and almost collapsing on the tilted mountain of pillows.

Another thought of going to Yakko crossed his mind, but it was so late and nobody Wakko knew talked about their feelings past four a.m. Though Yakko did have a nasty habit of staying up past any normal bedtime. Maybe he could talk Wakko back to sleep, or read to him from one of his journals, or just let him stick around for a minute in silence.

Wakko’s body turned for the stairs, but his head remained in the direction where Dot was. He wouldn’t feel right just up and leaving her when he was the one that got her to stay at his side for more than thirty minutes, like he had first promised.

With another deep breath and bracing his shoulders, Wakko scooped her up bridal style − _thisclose_ to laughing out loud at how she was actually much lighter than she looked − and carefully took one step at a time. He did almost drop her at one point, but that was only because she’d startled him by grabbing his shirt in her sleep and nuzzling her cheek close to his heart.

Wakko couldn’t be mad at that and did his best to kiss Dot’s forehead as he continued down the hall. It was a hassle using his tail to turn the doorknob, but he succeeded on the fourth try and shut the door as quietly as possible with his elbow.

Of course he couldn’t be as lucky tonight. None of the lamps were on, there were no notebooks clumped together on the bed, and in said bed was the one toon Wakko had hoped would be awake. Second thoughts were bumping and crashing into one another, but he was already there and figured if Yakko saw Dot in his arms, he wouldn’t ask many questions.

“Yakko?” Wakko stepped closer to the bed and nudged his chin with his foot. “ _Yakko._ ”

Yakko spluttered awake, sitting up halfway in bed and rubbing the side of his face. “Wha…? What happened? What’s wrong?”

“Think we can bunk with you for the night?”

Guilt and embarrassment washed warm over Wakko’s face to be asking something so childish. He still didn’t feel right when Yakko mumbled a “yeah, sure” and sleepily lifted his covers for him to put Dot down and then crawl in after her.

A hush settled over the three in bed, Yakko and Wakko sandwiching Dot and the quiet breathing turned to soft snoring of 2/3 of the siblings rising in the air. Wakko’s eyes locked onto the corners of the room. Every time he closed them, they would open just as fast at the thought of returning to that random nightmare.

Absolute fury this time crept into his heart towards his brain that was _once again_ refusing to tell him what it had been about. All he knew was that he sensed it could come back, and the longer he thought about it, the more determined he was to not fall asleep.

Then Wakko’s mind pulled a dirty move and suggested that if he didn’t want to figure out the point of his nightmare, then he could think about how young their composer had been when he’d gotten sick. That pushed in a heartache worse than his scare of mistaking the pillow fort for something else. It wasn’t like Wakko was naive and believed people lived on forever, but…

Did it have to be The Great Stonini? And so soon? He had been in his forties. Around Tom Ruegger’s age!

Wakko’s mind pulled one lousy trick after another, like making him wonder what if it had been Tom instead? Or Steven Spielberg? What if one of their cast members had suddenly gotten sick and they wouldn’t have known until it was brought to light through a phone call?

What if Yakko or Dot got sick one day? Could toons even get to that level of illness Stone had had? Well, if Wakko had to be stapled with constant reminders that he was hypoglycemic, he supposed anything was possible. But then, what if he really got sick one day? What could ever top being a quiet “eleven-year-old” hypoglycemic eating machine?

An arm around him just about put him in the ICU, and Wakko swallowed hard past the lump in his throat when Yakko pulled him closer, still fast asleep. He hadn’t noticed he’d been shaking the bed and Yakko probably thought he was cold.

“You okay?” He muttered.

Wakko nodded. “Fine. Sorry about that.”

“Don’t gotta apologize.”

Wakko nodded again, putting a desperate amount of focus into his brother’s hand smoothing down his cap. He tried focusing on Dot’s scent and hugged onto her like a teddy bear, thinking about their little late-night get together downstairs. It only reminded him of how he had hid away in the bathroom to cry.

“Yakko?”

“Hm?”

“I had a dream.”

“That’s nice, Dr. King.”

“No, I mean…a bad one.”

Wakko kept his rapidly-wetting eyes on the back of Dot’s head, absentmindedly smoothing down her ears and breathing as quietly as possible.

“I didn’t like it,” he whispered. “I can’t remember what it was, but I know I didn’t like it. It was dark, and I think I was there with you, and Dot, and someone else. It wasn’t fun.”

“I can’t imagine any bad dream being fun,” Yakko pointed out, having sat up on his side at some point. He reached over to run a thumb under Wakko’s cheek, unintentionally pushing out a tear and wiping it just as fast. “Sounds like it really kept you up, huh?”

“Why do people die?”

Yakko remained silent at the question, his hand still on Wakko’s face. Wakko watched his attention slowly go over to stare at nothing in the room. He moved his face away from the touch and sat up too, repeating his question around a larger lump in his throat. Yakko shook his head and let out a small laugh.

“Don’t take this the wrong way Wakko, but now really isn’t the time to get philosophical. I don’t even know how we haven’t aged or why you have your accent.”

“’Cause we’re toons. People made us. How come we were drawn, Yakko?”

“I’m gonna say to probably communicate emotions and ideas in a unique, easy-to-perceive way that both small children and adults can understand. I could be wrong.”

Wakko swallowed and took in a deep breath. “But toons don’t _die_.”

Yakko raised a brow down at him, looking over his face in the tense silence before sitting all the way up and beckoning him close with a soft _c’mere_. Wakko carefully crawled over Dot to sit in his lap and kept his knees close to his chest as Yakko hugged him from behind.

“I know what this is about, little bro,” he murmured. “Do I even need to bring up you-know-who again?”

“No, please.”

“Okay. Look kiddo, I know how different we are from humans and how different they are from us. They can do things we can’t and vice versa. It’s not fair, especially when we have to watch them go while we live on, but look at it this way.”

Wakko’s ear twitched at the soft sigh Yakko let out, and he could feel the latter’s heartbeat rising steadily against his shoulder. Dot was right. He didn’t like discussing stuff like this.

“We get to grow around new people,” Yakko continued on before Wakko could say he didn’t have to talk if he didn’t want to. “We get to make more memories with them, and we get to do and see things that weren’t around when we first came on paper. The best part is,” he whispered, bringing Wakko closer for a head kiss, “we’ll be doing it together.”

Wakko jumped when he felt a hand on his knee and looked down to see Dot looking up at him, eyes opened and smiling tiredly. He briefly put his hand over hers and carefully pulled her up. She didn’t protest and hugged onto him, just as tightly as he had done with her, while Yakko’s other arm wrapped around her waist.

“It’s gonna take some time, sibs,” Yakko told them. “I know we’re not used to things like this, but we’ll be okay.”

Wakko’s eyes were already closing as he heard himself ask, “Promise?”

He wasn’t sure what Yakko told him, or if he had even said anything in the first place, but whatever was said or went unsaid, just having his big brother and little sister comforting him made him feel a whole lot better.


	8. Set in Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As of 03/1/21, this is a rewritten and renamed version of Chapter 9, “Miladies are Strange Creatures.” It has been moved back to fall in line with the timeline after “Small Boy, Big Thoughts.”

Yakko was not a toon who wore suits well. He hated the restriction ties had on him and how tight the pants had to be in order to be considered formal enough. The sharper the cloth, the more narcissistic he thought it made him look. But it was supposed to make him feel more like an adult, respectable, in control.

He had never felt so small and reserved on the studio grounds.

It was almost like he hadn’t seen that shielded WB logo in centuries, he almost forgot soundstages looked the way they did, and even the day was out of sync with his mood. Blue skies, 72 degrees, mild breezes and cloudless sunshine. It fit more for a day for watching a baseball game, not going to a memorial service.

The walk over to the Eastwood Scoring Stage had been…as expected. No one spoke, Wakko had practically guarded the bunch of flowers with his life, and aside from giving half-hearted smiles and waves to those they recognized in attendance, the Warners’ mannerisms had and still were molded into one large, depressed lump.

Walking to the service hadn’t been so bad, but having to sit still and be surrounded by grieving friends, scattered co-stars, and the distant family of Stone dressed all in black was enough to make Yakko want to curl in on himself.

Tiny corsages and clips, either in silver or white, were pinned on the musical ensemble’s shirts as they shifted to a more upbeat tenor. The ceiling lights were low and soft, and the projection board behind them was displaying a slideshow of past and recent photos of Stone’s life.

Yakko sat back in his chair, one leg over the other and fingers tapping together as he stared sightlessly at the empty composer’s podium. A wreath of white flowers hung around a grainy black-and-white photograph of Stone smiling off to the side, headphones pressed around his frizzle of gray and his hands holding his baton, ready to create another masterpiece.

Tears started gathering without movement or reason to, and Yakko turned slightly in his chair so he wouldn’t have to look at it. To his left, Wakko’s mouth kept switching from admiration to painful realization as the orchestra spread out the quiet classical piece. His elbows rested on his knees and the top buttons of his shirt were undone, exposing a pale yellow undershirt.

Yakko resisted the urge to reach over and fix it, instead glancing over to Dot. Her ankles were crossed and her back was straight, but every so often he would see her big-girl composure crumble. He heard her sniff, sometimes caught her rubbing her eyes with her wrist, and once or twice her elbow would tap his as she wrapped her cardigan around her body before giving up in a huff and leaving it open.

Yakko smiled weakly every time the maroon fabric of her dress showed. Even in mourning she refused to follow the blue (or in this case, black) norm. He was no exception. He had found a pair of dark slacks he was surprised still fit him, but anything else to match just anchored heavy on his stomach and the next thing he knew, he had pulled a very light tan turtleneck over his head and ushered his sibs out the door.

One brief look up at the slideshow and Yakko’s hands sweat through his gloves. He didn’t understand what was making him so nervous all of a sudden. It was a nice gesture from Stone’s family and the pictures they had brought to show were equally pleasing, and yet…

Yakko’s hands clamped together, knuckles cracking and body tilting forward. He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until a hand to his knee made him snort out through his nose.

“S’Alright?” Wakko asked softly.

“S’Okay,” Yakko spoke in a hoarse whisper. He coughed into his fist and tried on another smile. It didn’t fit him. “Thanks for the checkup. How you holding up?”

“I’m hanging in there.” Wakko leaned ahead in his seat and waved a hand out. “ _Psst_. Dot.”

“What?” She grumbled through gritted teeth.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh yeah, there’s the million-dollar question.”

“Huh?”

Dot heatedly waved a hand and crossed her ankles tighter. “Nothing Wakko, never mind.”

He made a noise under his breath. “Just thought I’d ask.”

“Just thought I’d answer,” Dot half-mimicked him.

“Just thought I’d remind you two we’re at a memorial service,” Yakko warned.

They fell into a simultaneous line of silence after sighing out a different cause of irritation. They rested against the chairs in a strained attempt to look put together and crossed their arms, staring over at the solemn-looking men and women running bows across their violins. Yakko found his wandering attention returning over towards their late composer’s photograph.

He blinked a couple of times. There he was. Or once was. He was there, right in the room with everyone, but at the same time he wasn’t.

That one night back in March, the day following the announcement of Stone’s death, still stuck out to him and how vulnerable they had all been huddled together in Yakko’s bed. There had been other nights like it, sometimes with Wakko waking him up or hearing movement in Dot’s room late at night that would prompt him to check on her.

Yakko had had his own nights or even late afternoons spacing out, thinking of the eventual memorial service and filling his body with whatever tea and coffee brand he could find in the cabinets. The worst thoughts were at night when he really couldn’t sleep. Every time he had thought of the approaching services, Wakko’s little philosophies on humans and toons’ lives would make an appearance.

Yakko had never thought too deeply on the matter because he saw no reason to. His mind was always filled with one thought after the thought, 99.9% of them centering on Wakko and Dot, and that smidgen one percent wouldn’t be caught dead brooding about why toons worked the way they did. Humans didn’t even know, and they were the ones responsible for their creation in the first place.

A sudden bone-deep chill blew out Yakko’s thoughts then and there, and he rubbed his arms from the fictional chill. Wakko shivered a little too hard as he reached under his seat for their bright flower offering, and when Yakko turned to Dot out of curiosity, she was keeping her cardigan closed this time.

“Thanks Dick,” Yakko muttered, tone weary but amused.

Dot raised an eyebrow at him. “Who’re you talking to?”

“Myself. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine in the head.”

Wakko snorted. “I wouldn’t say that.”

A tepid smile framed Yakko’s mouth as he squeezed his brother’s shoulder and patted his sister’s back. He sensed a reasonable pitch of déjà vu when he kept his hands where they were.

It had never left after Randy’s phone call, or when they all went to shop for flowers, or when they had to wait a whole month to pay their respects to such an incredible man. It had returned that day when Yakko had been debating whether or not he should have said something when everyone met downstairs not wearing all black or any black at all. It had walked with the three when Yakko had started second guessing their purchase for a colorful bouquet all those weeks ago after seeing it held so protectively in Wakko’s arms.

That feeling was there, with Yakko now, poking and asking him why he wasn’t crying yet. He was unhappy by the influences around him and had been pretty hurt when the news reached his ears. So how come he wasn’t crying now?

Yakko let out a more than exhausted sigh and happened to meet Wakko’s eye. He had to force himself not to break off first when Wakko took one of his hands in his. He held the flowers in the other and nodded towards the decorated podium.

“You feeling okay to go up now?” He whispered.

Funny he was asking Yakko that and not the other way around. It was rare for Yakko to be the one comforted when he was so used to comforting. It was just second nature to him and something he couldn’t not do. What kind of brother would that make him?

“Am I?” Yakko muttered, unsure of whether he’d meant for it to come out as a joke or honest question for himself.

Wakko didn’t let go of his hand and gave it a squeeze. “It’s okay if you’re not. We can sit and wait a few more minutes, or whenever you’re ready.”

“Don’t feel like you have to wait on me,” Yakko insisted.

“You don’t want to go and put the flowers there yourself?” Dot asked curiously at the same time.

Wakko shook his head and hugged the petals to his chest. His eyes went to the podium, to the orchestra, and back as he adjusted awkwardly in his seat.

“I want you guys to be there with me when I do it,” he finally said.

 _Of course he does. You should know this._ Yakko glanced down when his right hand was taken as well and then softly squeezed. Dot gave him a small, encouraging smile and nodded forward.

“Okay?” She asked him quietly.

Yakko followed their gaze and eventually felt himself nod. “Ready when you are, sibs.”

Hand in hand, the three quietly left their seats and walked up to the podium. Wakko once again hugged the flowers to his chest for a minute, staring off to the side and audibly swallowing, before kneeling and placing the bundle in front of the wooden structure. He didn’t immediately stand up and let go of Yakko’s hand to smooth down the red, orange and yellow petals to his liking.

All of them simultaneously stared at the fuzzy photograph and sighed. Yakko knelt down beside Wakko, Dot following suit, and brought them both close by the shoulders. For a moment of silence, the three stared at the man who once made their zany adventures and seasoned one-liners even more memorable. It was nice to have gotten to work with him, and it was nice to have been another cast of toons that knew the name Richard Stone.

“It’s…” Wakko leaned into Yakko’s side. “It’s time for _Animaniacs_.”

Another beat of silence passed after those familiar four words. The trio didn’t move, breathe, or speak up right away.

“And we’re zany to the max,” Dot whispered.

Of course now would be the opportune moment for Yakko’s tears to finally show up to the party, but he wouldn’t leave the two hanging.

“So just sit back and relax, you’ll laugh ’til you collapse…”

“We’re _Animaniacs_ ,” the three Warners chorused softly as the orchestra slowly led them through their theme, one final time, just for The Great Stonini to hear.


	9. Good on Paper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, as of 03/01/21, this chapter has been moved from being Chapter 6 to Chapter 9 and has kept the same title as well as the same written work, with only minor details edited.

The couch had more personality than the rest of the room. The carpet had been replaced at least four times from the last visits since last month, and the walls still burned that acid green snot in Wakko’s eyes. The ceiling had at least been remodeled, but the lights were far too bright after the approaching gloom from outside.

Wakko tore his eyes away from the window and onto every dip and fold on the suit he pitied Scratchansniff for thinking was stylish. It wasn’t what he expected for someone of his pay grade, but maybe that was on purpose. Maybe he didn’t want to put him off by being too in his face with his salary.

Wakko wished the psychiatrist had done it by accident. He wished Scratchansniff had been late to their session because his washing machine and five cats had feasted on the suit and he hadn’t the heart to cancel − though it would’ve been much appreciated − so that was why he stumbled in looking like the scarecrow from _The Wizard of Oz_.

He wished everyone had gotten off their behinds and piled into their cars so Scratchansniff would be stuck in rush hour, not staring at him while encouraging him to “circumvent around any roadblocks and express his thoughts soberly.” Whatever that meant.

He wished Scratchansniff’s briefcase had a faulty lock so all of the paperwork he was scribbling on could fall out and get lost. If Wakko had the energy or appetite for paper cuts, he would have shoved those files down his throat. But Scratchy most likely had copies and would’ve extended their meeting times as punishment.

“Now Wakko, you said you recalled a time when you felt rather disconnected with yourself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Would you care to elaborate on that?”

Wakko’s fingers laced together, occasionally tapping the top of his knuckles as he gazed around the room for a minute.

“September,” he slowly started, “when we were still new to the show. We were everywhere, from Gilroy to Santa Paula, because we couldn’t actually fly to Paris but still wanted its aesthetics.” He shrugged. “It helped that we had good backdrops and Sami Frey.”

Scratchansniff nodded in between writing. “Sami Frey…Oh sure, you kids’ silly little skit about bothering Picasso. That was in ’93, I believe. Are you saying that was when you first started feeling off and away from yourself? About eight years ago?”

“I’ll say. It came and went for a few seconds, but I didn’t mind taking off my head when I had to introduce myself. You could say I felt rather disconnected with myself that day for sure.”

Scratchansniff stopped writing and stared like he always did. He didn’t facepalm this time and wasn’t giving his forehead any wrinkles, but he did look a little annoyed.

“No Wakko, that’s not what I meant.”

“Then why’d you ask?”

“I was hoping to get a less literal picture. You know, something troubling you mental wise and therefore leaving you feeling rather, well, let’s use uncoordinated, shall we?”

“Oh, uncoordinated? Why didn’t you say so?” Wakko sat up a bit, seeing he had gotten Scratchy’s interest if the man leaning forward and hovering the pencil over his notepad was any indication. With a halfhearted shrug, he fit his arms behind his head. “Sure, I’m losing my balance almost every other day.”

“That’s not the sense I mean by—”

“Not my fault some toons have big feet. Why do you think we hardly wear shoes? They’re so uncomfortable.”

“Wakko, I can see what you’re doing. You’re rambling so I won’t—”

“Do I look like I’m gaining weight, Doc? Back to being uncoordinated. You’re welcome. Dot picks on me and says I’m top heavy. You think that might be it?”

“Wakko, look, in these types of sessions we want… Well, no. You’re in no way disproportionately heavy at the top, so you are not in danger of toppling.”

He snorted. “Tell that to Jessica Rabbit.”

Scratchansniff shook his head. “You know how she’s always saying she was ‘drawn that way’. It’s not necessarily her fault that when her creators…”

In his triumph, Wakko smirked. The look was so subtle, and it was even more infuriating for Scratchansniff who caught a glimpse of it after making the foolish mistake to step right into the trap of a Warner brother, of all toons. The squiggly little wrinkles were now on his head, making him look like his true-blue p-psychiatrist self.

“Wakko, this isn’t funny.”

_It kind of is._

“Are you going to stop with the gags and let me help you?”

_Depends if I can leave early._

“Are you even listening to me?”

Wakko shook his head no while saying yes. The wrinkles stretched and grew a little more profound as Scratchansniff pointed his pencil at his nose, frowning in either warning or annoyance. Wakko was willing to bet it all on the latter.

“Are you going to answer me properly, then? Are you going to stop with the monkey business and talk to me?”

_“Don’t know what to say the monkeys won’t do.”_

That brought Wakko back. Even if their lyrics were repetitive up until the end, he, Yakko and Dot had still shined through with physical comedy. All their efforts in acting were shown in their facial expressions and actions, and Wakko had enjoyed every second doing what they did best on the lot.

He had to laugh to himself at how the song had portrayed them as knowingly unstable but charmingly entertaining, and he began to wonder if the people watching had actually thought − and if they still thought − that causing millions of dollars in damage to their workplace and making others lose their minds was just another prideful notch in their belts. Aside from a couple of set incidents and a few mishaps with celebrity cameos over the years, he was safe to say he and his siblings weren’t all that bad.

Not counting where he was currently sitting, but Wakko could just imagine it as another episode on the show. A late-night chitchat with Scratchansniff. Just another scene with a lot of responsibility on his part. No Yakko, no Dot. Just him.

“Wakko, are you alright?”

“I will as soon as I think of another way to throw you off again.”

He blinked at how off that had sounded. He had been betting on Scratchansniff asking if he was going to answer him again. Then he would have likely groaned and smushed a palm to his forehead, mumbling in German, and Wakko would’ve taken the opportune moment to quip:

“Hey, material like this doesn’t come overnight. I’ve been out of work for fifteen months. Give a toon a break.”

Now he was the one thrown off guard.

“I mean, yeah, I’m all right. I can also be all left.” And with a lame comeback to boot. “Ambidextrous, you know. Well, not really. That’s more Yakko’s department, but…”

Wakko shrugged, looking back over to the window as his brain shut down. He knew it was best to stop scrambling for another joke. He was desperate, true, but not that desperate to make a complete fool out of himself just so he could leave.

“Finished?” He nodded. “Will you answer my questions now?” Another nod.

Wakko caught Scratchansniff’s pensive look melting into a soft smile, and his body squirmed as his muscles sank into the chair. He didn’t like that. He felt like an insect under a microscope, or some little kid folding under pressure after being bullied into it. He especially didn’t like knowing that no matter how much he joked and punned and did the monkey stuff, there wasn’t a thing he could hide from those blue eyes.

Or were they brown? Hard to tell behind those Plexiglass windows Scratchansniff called glasses.

“Now then, before we leave…” Wakko groaned out loud, already halfway off the couch when the clock struck 7:30. “Before we leave,” Scratchansniff repeated with a bit of a hard edge to his tone, “I want to try something different this week for the two of us.”

“You’re letting me leave an hour early?”

“Cute. I’ve taken notice of certain patterns throughout our sessions starting from the very first day.”

He was supposed to do that anyway. How was that day any different?

“The way you may zone out without realizing it, or your unconscious fidgeting with your hands or your shirt. Common instances of trying to alleviate boredom or a verbal translation to uneasiness.”

Wakko rolled his eyes and tapped his feet together. How was it verbal if he wasn’t speaking? Oh wait, Scratchy had said it was a translation. He guessed that sort of made sense.

“In a way, your mind could be trying to pacify certain instances whenever they’re brought up. You fidget, stare at something, or try and distract yourself so you won’t have that burden anymore, _ja?_ You’re not always willing to share, and that’s perfectly fine.”

 _I’ll share if I want_ _to_ , Wakko silently grumbled.

“So, I want you to start keeping a journal—”

“I have to?”

“I want you to start keeping a journal and record any instances whenever you feel yourself beginning to think of anything unorthodox or funny. Not funny ha-ha,” Scratchansniff cut in before Wakko could open his mouth again. “Odd, peculiar, out of left field. Got it?”

It couldn’t be helped; Wakko had to don a Yankees Jersey, he had to stand up on the couch leaning against a wooden bat, and he had to push his blue-gray-white cap out of his eyes.

“You haven’t _met_ me, Scratchy. My thoughts are always out of the park.”

Scratchansniff pressed a palm so hard to his face he stumbled and fell flat in his chair, mumbling something in German that could not have been kid friendly. In his regular clothes as fast as he had changed, Wakko hopped off the purple couch and pat the doctor’s bald head on the way out.

Stepping out into the cool California night air, his playful disposition slumped and he pulled his jacket close, tucking his chin down in the collar. He hadn’t done a clothing swap like that in years, nor had he talked this much since Stone’s service. His shoulders shivered, but he was nowhere near cold.

Although, leaving a psychiatrist’s office in the early mornings and late evenings made the air around him so chilly it almost hurt to breathe.

Wakko never wanted anyone seeing him leaving Scratchansniff’s office. Not even a patient of his. He didn’t need nor want any accusations from a big mouth, or worse − a camera. He wasn’t about to make a detour for the nearest Michaels to buy a journal, and it’d make no difference if he strayed off the path home anyway; Wakko had wanted to be on his way to the apartment by 7:45 on the dot when Scratchansniff had doled the idea of recording his thoughts down on paper.

Thanks to his p-psychiatrist, the usual fifteen-minute walk Wakko didn’t mind taking to his neighborhood turned into an even 32 minutes by how leadened his feet got, the increase in traffic, and how he was dragging one thought out by another.

He didn’t need a pencil in his hand jotting down the newest trailer/episode. Writing would organize them though, and it would give him more insight to what he unconsciously thought of. But it was so embarrassing! The idea of having to take an hour or so out of his day because he was feeling crummy and then venting to something that couldn’t even talk back? If it couldn’t talk back, it wouldn’t give him strife.

“You could have a million answers but not the one I want. Where were you?”

Wakko rolled his eyes, shutting the front door with his foot. Banter or not, he was in no mood to be tonight’s entertainment. He was already angry for choosing to walk instead of hailing a taxi. His feet were sore, he had to ignore so many strange looks from nosy neighbors on the way up, and he was pretty sure whatever he’d gotten sprayed with by an inconsiderate car’s tires was not water.

“Do you have any idea what time it is, young man?” And Dot was still dealing the funny card.

“You tell me,” he mumbled, pushing her by the face so she’d flop backwards on the couch.

“Aren’t I supposed to be the one who shows up late?”

“It’s Opposite Day.”

“A memo would be nice next time.” Dot sprang over the couch, redoing the strings on her pink bathrobe. “Where were you, though?”

Wakko pointed at the door. “Out.”

“I could tell since you came back in. Come on, tell me where you were. I’m nosy.”

“I thought you were Dot.”

She rolled her eyes this time and poked him twice in the chest. “No Dad jokes until you actually want the job.”

 _My application won’t be due for a long, long time._ Wakko stepped up to the writing desk, taken aback by a horde of open notebooks and stacks of copies piling on the surface.

“Uh, what’s with all of the paper cuts waiting to happen?”

Dot shook her head. “Yakko. He’s in a mood.”

“A bad one?”

“It’s a mood, I can tell you that much. He’s going to be up for a while, so I’ve been waiting up for him.”

“Why? Where is he?”

“Went down to see a neighbor about something.” Dot had returned to the couch and lazily reached for a magazine. “Don’t ask me why again. He didn’t say, so I’m giving him another ten minutes. Then I’m off to bed.”

Wakko still didn’t understand how that made sense in her book. “Just clear a spot and use the desk while he’s gone.”

“Huh?” Dot barely looked up from the polished pages of dresses and waved her hand. “Oh no, I’ve gotta make him coffee.”

“Did his hands break?”

She paused for a minute, the only thing that eventually moved were her eyes. “Yes, Wakko. Yakko’s been writing all of that junk with his tail and ears. A rare Warner talent.”

Wakko shot her a scowl and clicked his tongue, making room on the desk for himself if nobody was going to be using it. Using his jacket as a shield, he reached around to his hammerspace to feel the sleek bag he had to make a pitstop for.

He didn’t know why cashiers put things in some painfully noisy bag of shame and expected you not to get weird looks because of it. He had honestly forgotten he could store things practically in thin air after a handful of his neighbors had stopped to stare over their balconies at him. Wakko had had half a mind to snap that they better mind their business, because he could make anything appear with the wave of a hand. He didn’t stop at mallets, cream pies, and anvils.

“Oh, lighten up,” he heard Dot saying. Wakko also heard the magazine flopping on the coffee table and her coming over. He hid the bag as she appeared behind, squeezing his shoulders. “I was joking. If Yakko’s going to be writing all night, he’ll need something to keep him going. I don’t mind staying up to make him coffee. You want some, too?”

Wakko shook his head. “No, thank you.”

Dot shrugged, squeezed his shoulders again, and headed to the kitchen. “Suit yourself.”

Once he heard the steady noises of the coffee maker, Wakko let out a sigh of relief and rested his arms on all the scattered papers and notebooks. Cleaning wasn’t just something he did as a nervous habit. He figured with three siblings under one roof, they’d want a clean apartment. But he was too tired to bother, too tired to care, and as he took his time going up the stairs to his room, Wakko thought about what he’d write if he took that journal business seriously:

_“Believe it or not, my crazy brother and sister keep me sane.”_


	10. Make Up [Your Mind] or Shut Up

The pouty red lips. The swooshy lashes. The technicolor-worthy glow. Yep, that was Allan Snyder’s hand. Dot would have bargained her entire soul just to be counted among his clientele at the start of the 1950s. Lucky Katharine Hepburn, Doris Day, Raquel Welch, and Marilyn Monroe. If those ladies had trusted a simple man with their million-dollar faces, then she at least deserved to have every trick in his book in her library.

And why shouldn’t she? She was still a shining star, after all. Granted, she had less lines than the folds in her skirt and half the time she was blocked by someone else’s ego, but that didn’t mean she had to look frumpy when asking “hash browns or fruit?”

Kohl and eyeliner were no strangers on the eyes. Poppy petals made a home on her naturally plumped-up pout. She had to smile at the tub of Vaseline, remembering how very high in demand it had been for soap and moisturizer back then. The Greta Garbo Eye was tricky but something she admired and envied those who could do since she barely—

“Dot, now or never!”

Right. First line of business, just one more glop of Vaseline as the highlighter on the cheeks and brow bone for a subtle, wet-look finish. Everything but the kitchen sink was soon all over Dot’s upper lids and water lines, the colors making her pupils look pronounced in sophistication rather than cartoonishly bugged out.

“Get out of there already! You’ve been in there for ages!”

Eyebrow shape was a very individual characteristic, and she severely debated on drawing them on in tiny peaks to help minimize the wideness of her forehead. She would never forgive Warner Bros. for glorifying the white space in later seasons.

“Are you in a meeting or what? I know you can hear me! You’re laughing!”

Dot hovered the end of a rattail comb above her quivering top lip, nose touching the cool surface of the medicine cabinet as she put gentle pressure on the skin with the end of the chopstick—

Wait, no, chopsticks weren’t a beauty product. She turned, mouth agape from the wet paint and disbelief. Wakko was really knocking “Chopsticks” down the door to be let in.

_He is unbelievable._

Using the end of the comb as a guideline, Dot shepherded the lipstick for darker reds on the outer corners and lighter shades in the middle to add dimension. By the third stroke, she realized how pale her cheeks were and how metallic her eyes looked. Forever and a half ago, she had kept photocopies of a chart from some makeup lady in Macy’s on her mirrors for months because she couldn’t ever remember how the stuff went on and came off. She loved the art behind it but hated the tedious process if she wanted a certain look.

“Aw man, did I forget to… Dammit!”

“Watch your language!”

“Wakko, shut up and leave me alone!”

“Hurry up and let me use the bathroom!”

Dot rolled her heavily made up eyes and wiped her entire face clean, fumbling around for the Vaseline again and an additional tub of white powder.

_“Used too sparingly and you’ll look washed out. Used too quickly, the effect is hard, vulgarizing.”_

God, Fannie Brice had been a lifesaver. She wished she and her had ended on better terms. She missed the kid.

“Wakko, what are you doing? Put the drill away.”

“Dot won’t let me in the bathroom!”

“We have a perfectly good one downstairs, you know.”

“I need the shower.”

Dot had already gotten off the step stool at the arrival of Yakko’s voice and, holding back her giggles, had quietly flipped the lock. “I’ll say,” she commented in time to opening the door.

Finally with full access to water, Wakko all but rammed into her, shouting “Don’t look!” over his shoulder as he tossed his red cap on the cluttered counter.

“Don’t worry,” both of his siblings deadpanned.

_He almost never wore pants for five seasons and suddenly he goes conservative?_

“Gotta love the kid.” Dot raised her eyes to the door. Yakko smirked and gave a half-hearted shrug. “You both have a unique way of thinking. You can’t help it. Please tell me you’re holding all of that for a friend,” he added, spinning his finger up at her face.

“Yes, three − me, myself, and I. So shove off. I need to look pretty.”

“You can say that again.”

“Wakko, I will flush this toilet.”

It really wasn’t that big of an issue to her, and it was probably because she was distrustful of her own skills that Dot normally didn’t wear makeup. When it came to the minimal everyday look, she saw no point. With simple eyeliner and some eyeshadow, she’d call it a day. On a good day she’d find her lipstick and her good perfume, but on a day like this − especially if she wanted to avoid looking like she’d just watched a marathon of _Oprah_ from the shower steam − she needed to hurry.

Face lathered with foundation, eyelids brushed again with shadow, and lips done in under two minutes, Dot fluffed on a bit more powder for a softening effect, brushing and brushing off with different tissue. She grabbed a magazine she’d brought with her and fanned her face, finally sighing a peeved out, “What?”

Yakko shrugged again. “Nothing.”

“That’s saying a lot, coming from a guy who runs his mouth like an Olympian. Now again I ask, what?”

“Nothing. You’re just cute.”

“You know the show didn’t know what the hell we were, but I’m sure not a fish baiting for that damn line.”

Wakko pushed against the shower curtains. “Can we mind the language out there?”

“Can we mind our business in here?” Dot snapped, very much tempted to flush the toilet now.

“How about we keep _in mind_ what’ll happen if you both don’t put a cork in it?”

Dot raised the magazine a little higher, murmuring under her breath and only letting the “he started it” be intelligible to Yakko’s ears. But knowing him, he had most likely heard her being smart and she was skating on thin ice. Lately she always seemed to be all the more closer to a nasty slip whenever she let some pitchy commentary fly, or whenever she dealt some elegant four-letter words in front of company.

Dot hated how she could never make the counter argument that her brothers had done or currently did the same thing and were just playing an authoritative/hypocrite role. She couldn’t ever officially say she’d heard either Yakko or Wakko fouling up their vocabulary in the many, many years they had lived and worked together.

Could they? Sure. Would they? Probably not as much as her. Half out of her thoughts, Dot slapped the magazine down and went to work on her hair.

“You know Wakko and I aren’t technically kids,” she pointed out.

“In human years? Sure. In toon years, well sister sibling, that’s debatable.”

Wakko groaned over the water. “Oh, not this again.”

“You hush in there. Come on Yakko, you know where we all stand. We practically lived on the studio grounds and you let us ‘run wild’ without you.”

He snorted. “There were only so many sound stages you could see before they all looked the same.”

“Fine, that doesn’t count so much. Look at us now. Wakko and I can actually walk home to our very own apartment.”

“Sure, an apartment under my name.”

Dot rolled her eyes. “Okay, well, I’ve signed back with Warner Bros. after taking a year off. That was pretty adult of me.”

“Your adult idea, my adult eyes double checking the fine print.”

“I’ve been to Glendale, Ontario, Pasadena, even the Mojave Desert−!”

“Eleven, forty-eight, and sixteen minutes respectively by car. All within the vicinity of Burbank and this apartment complex, might I add?” Yakko stopped inspecting where his nails would be and sent a grin towards a scowling Dot. “And for that last one, green screens have come a long way.”

“Dot, you haven’t played chess since 1993,” Wakko called out before she could open her mouth again. “I believe that’s checkmate.”

She huffed an irritating bang out of her face and held the scissors out, wordlessly demanding that Yakko take them to prevent her from misusing them in more ways imaginable. The little chuckle he did and the loving little squeeze to her shoulder she fought not to groan at.

Like a little girl, she crossed her arms and muttered, “You know, you especially drive me insane.”

Yakko smiled. “I try.”

“Why don’t you just say it?”

The silence Dot received wasn’t an uncharacteristic sign, but it wasn’t exactly leaning towards an on purpose route, either. This only infuriated her more, and the sounds of the shower pipes and soft snipping at the back of her head seemed to grow louder. The mirror had already fogged up to the point where she could no longer see his ears. Dot’s eyes squeezed shut once she heard her own question echo in her head, but she wouldn’t stop if she had the attention.

“Why don’t you just say it?” She repeated. “You don’t like the idea of me going all public, of working and coming home so late, and traveling all over California like how Liz Taylor remarries − constantly.” She slapped the working hand behind her, not wanting it too short. “It messes you up, me meeting all these important people and doing so much for so little. Makes you wanna come back. Why not open your damn mouth and just _say it_ already?”

It almost scared her, how fast Yakko turned her around and the hard shine in his eyes like he was having an internal debate whether to yell or not. When he finally spoke, the shower turned off and his voice was quiet.

“Why would you ever think—”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

Throwing a dirty look at the gloveless hand that inched away from the shower curtains, Dot hopped off the stool to get her coat and spare key, slamming the front door behind her.


	11. Louder and Smaller

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven’t updated this in a month? Sheesh…

A California scrub jay sat on a clothesline, paused a minute with its head switching side to side, then pealed into song before moving into orange skies.

From the high windows came stupidly bright rectangles of daylight, sending white beams to point out the dust in the air, the crease marks in the furniture, and all the binding imperfections of the books on the table. Maybe that was why they really called it a sunroom. Whatever the sun shined on in the room, whatever it touched, it burned and bullied the flaws until sundown.

If Wakko wasn’t so tired, he’d go to another room.

He fidgeted with the top of his cap, wondering the exact location the apartment was facing − _it’d be cool if it was turned towards Glendale, or what about the Golden State Freeway?_ − but then he figured, well, just knowing that he was still in Burbank would be fine.

He lazily flicked his ears around for any sounds from outside, for cars honking or people arguing. Were those seagulls or garden birds on the roof? Were the apartments industrial or residential? Then, all over again, he focused on the large casement windows with an empty smile, the frames new but not the sort he could easily open.

_Why did Dot have to say that?_

It felt like a fresh two hours ago rather than a stale two days ago that she had snapped how he’d needed to open his “damn mouth”. But open his mouth about what? Because it certainly wasn’t anything about her and Warner Bros., absolutely not. His contract with them had finished the day after Christmas in ’99.

_But…why did she have to say it like that?_

Couldn’t she see he was happy for her? Proud of her even, like a good big brother should be. It wasn’t always peaches and cream behind the bigger parts of what made cartoons, well, cartoons. Didn’t the damn brat…whoa, no, no, Dot was not a brat. Probably just stressed from all of the studio homework they were giving her now that she was going in alone. Wakko didn’t need to be cursing in his head or spitting on her stress.

_Even if she can sometimes be a pain. And about pain…how come Yakko was so quiet? That just hurt._

Was it because he had thought Wakko and Dot really were kids and they needed to handle their argument like adults? Could what had happened in the bathroom be called an argument? Dot hadn’t yelled and screamed, but she had sounded pretty upset. When Yakko had thought she was talking to him, he hadn’t yelled and screamed either, but sounded surprised and maybe even a little hurt.

And Wakko, well, he hadn’t known what to feel or how to react at the time.

_Some older brother. He hardly refereed what happened!_

Maybe that was because, like Wakko, Yakko hadn’t known how to react at that moment, either? Then again in any given situation, not counting Richard Stone’s passing, he always had something to do or say. Wakko could never tell who wore the pants in the house. Either Yakko was taking responsibility to make sure his brother and sister were accounted for, or Dot would nag at him and Yakko to make sure they ate something before she disappeared for another 72 hours.

But half of the time, it was never Wakko. Half of the time, he never really felt like the middle kid. He was always the baby of the Warners while his older brother or little sister took charge around him.

Wakko didn’t think he could talk about how frustrated it made him. He bet if he put his foot down for once, he’d be in clown shoes and once again the day’s entertainment. No journal entry Scratchansniff assigned him would be safe; he’d have shred it up so badly by how fast and hard his pencil clipped the pages.

But he loved his siblings. He had to love them. He’d be crazy not to love them.

_Right? Right. It’s so obvious. Don’t be stupid! Even though we do sometimes fight, and get mad, and throw things._

Wakko sighed and buried himself underneath the throw pillows, nibbling on his gloves as his tail began to twitch and his pulse started shaking out of his range. No, no, he wasn’t stupid to think poorly of how he, Yakko and Dot went on about the house. All that analyzing junk and realizing there were faults or whatever was healthy. Hadn’t Scratchansniff said something like that during one of their meetings?

Wakko peeked out to watch the 6:50 a.m. colors of the sunroom lift into the blues and pinks of another 7:00 a.m. day., yet in between those agonizing ten minutes he could still notice his hands hugging around himself were pinching his skin.

He continuously thought and said quietly to the air, yes, he did love Yakko and Dot, he really did. He loved it whenever he could spend some time watching movies or just laze around with Yakko. He loved whenever he got to hold Dot’s hand whenever they’d go running down the block on a hot day.

All the way back in March he had told his head, _“Believe it or not, my crazy brother and sister keep me sane.”_

Maybe if he had told Scratchansniff that, or even B.B., his stomach wouldn’t knot up so much and he could actually breathe right if he so much as thought of a time where the three of them hadn’t seen eye to eye.

And there had been plenty of those moments before, during, and after _Animaniacs_.

Wakko shivered under the claustrophobic huddle of pillows and kicked them away. Where was that little plastic black baggie? This trailer had run far too long and was showing all. Anger, confusion, frustration, gloom. It was all sneaking up on him and taking him under his arms in an instant, no mercy. It was going to make him sit and watch until the very end unless he pulled the plug.

And Wakko was going to pull the plug. He was going to sleep it off, because he was afraid to wonder, _what was wrong with him_ , for too long in case he got an answer he didn’t want.


	12. An English Rose By Any Other Name

**August 2001**

The dress’s waist was narrow, but a loose fit that reached just below Dot’s knees. The pumps she wore added simplicity and elegance to the overall piece, but she could do without the hat. Her face was made up but not overdone, and the hair she could never grow out was weighed down by extensions, loose silk, and a perfect double dutch braid.

There was a bittersweet shyness to her, a hesitation in her arms and a husky softness to her voice. One step forward left her shivering on the platform for ten minutes of numbing silence.

_Yup, this is it. This is where my actions have led me._

The initial delight of the clean air and unspoiled views soon staled. The heart-thumping euphoria of escaping the city gave way to loneliness. Now she wanted the noise of the busy streets, Saturday nights with girlfriends, and sandwich shops only a thirty-minute walk from the apartment.

An arm wrapped around her, pulling her into a chest beating out hopefulness.

“Well? What do you think?”

Dot paused. Shoot, what did she think?

“If I could remember my thoughts, it’d sound beautiful,” she mumbled, almost throwing up by how corny she must have sounded.

“That’s the wonder of the country. It takes your breath away.” _Okay, he’s able to roll with it._ “But what do you think? Honestly.”

_Honestly, honest… Honest thoughts, my opinion._

“What do I think? It’s any place I’ve told you I’d kill to visit. It’s every little home on a quaint prairie on a patch of green grass. And…”

“And?” He pressed, just a beat too early, but he sounded sincere.

“And I have this freedom now and I feel good, but it’s sad to have it all.” Dot shook her head, stepping out of the hold she should have already gotten out of two minutes ago. “You shouldn’t have done all of this for love security. I can’t take you for granted.”

“Taken for granted? You’ve never… I don’t understand.”

“I…” _Rewind and play it off. It’ll come to you._ “Abel, I love you too much to do that to you. I need to keep learning, to keep seeing and living. Then someday,” Dot slowly added with a conserved smile, “I’ll be the woman you deserve. One able to give love completely.”

The man she adored, the one who’d seen one too many summers and not enough winters, squeezed her hands.

“Oh honey, will you?”

Dot smiled and leaned in so her forehead could rest on his.

“Thank you,” she said in barely more than a whisper.

“For what?” He replied, his voice low and confused.

“For being you.” Her voice wavered, exhilarated from the tension between them, and with that she filled the gap and kissed a honeyed pair of lips.

Honeyed ham. Jesus, he could serve her Thanksgiving for a month and she still wouldn’t go hungry.

“Cut! Fine, fine work Mr. Day-Lewis. Work on those gaps, Miss Warner. Take five everyone!”

Makeup artists, assistant directors, the stunt double, and sound engineers milled around at the director’s call. Three to five men in overalls bundled over to grab a hold of the unusually large train platform prop, wheeling it out of view and revealing, pretty melodramatically Dot thought with a snicker, the charming and romantic seaside of Carmel.

“God, so beautiful,” she murmured into the salty breeze, unconsciously slipping off the suede pair of nightmares that mocked her height rather than helped.

Dot had actually laughed out loud when she’d been told Carmel had a law against high heels. She wanted to know where the hidden cameras were so she could break out her new slingbacks and prance about as she pleased. The municipal code of Carmel had laughed right back at her and said she could forget about her first lead role in eight years if she didn’t find heels less than two inches or obtain a permit for them.

And after seeing Carmel’s uneven sidewalks and pavement on the drive over, some of which had protruding tree roots, the high heel law didn’t seem all that bad.

“Hey Dottie, was I good?”

Dot glanced up behind the hand fan she had spawned, already in her chair and trying to beat the sudden humidity after having just complimented the natural scenery.

_Damn bipolar beach._

“Fine, kid. Just fine,” she said with a smile.

It wasn’t everyday you got Daniel Day-Lewis, fresh out of retirement, roped into the newest drama script of _Park Avenue Fantasy_. At least that’s what Dot had read, hoped, and prayed in the past thirty days of filming that that was what the final rendition would be. She couldn’t stress that word enough.

Final, please, final.

In between retakes and publicity stunts, Dot had truly surprised herself by pitying rather than pummeling the writers and wanted whatever it was they were getting tipsy off of to believe names like _Omega Street Rag_ or _Martian L. Touch_ would get the movie buffs excited. She also wanted to know whether it was Elmer’s or Gorilla Warner Bros. was snorting if they were seriously going to green light a plot as loose as ‘a lackey reporter and attractive model team up to go on the rampage in the French Riviera’.

Real Golden Age Hollywood genius there. Absolutely a spitting image. (Maybe if Linda Evangelista was playing the female lead. Maybe.)

“Oh William Wyler, if only you had been born thirteen years earlier,” Dot muttered, skimming over a copy of the script.

Sure he would’ve been in his 80s, but no cigar or shot of bourbon would have mucked up his genius. Dot would have loved to be a “far, far better actress” than she had ever been. Or given her own Roman Holiday. With Laurence Olivier.

She just had a thing for Englishmen.

“Dorothy?”

Speaking of Englishmen.

“Dot. Just Dot is fine.”

“Dot, right, sorry.” Daniel’s cheeks flashed brighter than the silk in her hair. “God knows I still feel like I’m in a fever dream to be working with Warner Bros. It’s incredible.”

“You’re taking it better than me when I found out I’d have to be working with Warner brothers. Bad enough we have to share a bathroom.”

Daniel let out an easy laugh and Dot smiled a little more under the heat.

“What I should have said was, I can’t believe I’m working with a Warner Bros. starlet such as yourself. A toon, nonetheless! Not something my publicist has heard everyday.”

“If you won’t make a big deal out of it, I won’t,” Dot said simply, trading the fan for a pair of sunglasses. Through the blue tint (and closed eyes at first), she could still see Daniel staring at her. “Yes?”

“I also, before I forget, I also want to thank you.”

She raised a brow. “What’d I do?”

“Just…I don’t know, just being yourself, love.” Daniel shrugged and knelt down to pat her hand. “For not making a big hurrah over my coming out of retirement, you know?”

Dot shrugged. “We never knew you retired in the first place.”

“I couldn’t be parading around my break from the cameras to receive more glory from my stepping away from it. You understand that, right?”

Dot shrugged again and returned to the script. “If that’s what you want, keep it to yourself.”

But privacy wasn’t in fashion anymore—like that one time, six years ago in August, when she had been driving to pick Babs up from the airport and along the bare road there was an old movie house from the 70s. With the pink rabbit’s face and name in lights alongside her TTA cast mates, their faces and names also dazzling, already promoting a tour in West Hollywood and El Segundo in between their returning appearances for a cartoon special after two years.

Dot remembered pulling the car up at a distance down the street (it had been too much to take up close) and saying to herself, “Oh my God.”

There it was, her best friend and her co-stars all in lights. And she sat there, lying over the steering wheel, shaking her head, and thinking, _So that’s the way it looks on the other side. Go fig._

“…all, but not for everyone.” Dot glanced up at Daniel still going on, still patting her hand. “Never realized how much I’d miss working behind a camera. Being in Italy helped me a lot, and getting to work with DiCaprio, Diaz, and now Dot Warner in the New Year amazes me.”

Dot playfully adjusted the script over his head like a visor. “I hear you got to go to Rome shooting _Gangs of New York_. It’s like you never left.”

“Alright people, back-to-one! Let’s get those retakes in now. We’re burning daylight!”

There was a reaction that came to the studio, Dot suddenly recalled with a shiver, and in the fan mail and from the people when she and her brothers had “retired” from television in ’98. All the newsmen and all the Ann Hoovers wanted to know why they weren’t as active in serials anymore, and where they were now, and how they were living up to their zany legacy.

There sure had been a big hurrah over Dot’s comeback to the screens. Maybe because she was jumping from a veteran television star to an upstarting film actress? But was that so much of a jolting scandal? Was she in trouble with the new decade? Would she be able to brew a more mature limelight after over sixty years of cutesy one-liners and explosive slapstick?

Dot really hoped so.


	13. Over The Hill and Through the Hollywoods

The skies weren’t a psychedelic candy blue or that perfect baby blue seen in postcards, but it reminded Yakko a lot of a picture he, Wakko and Dot had done with Richard Widmark some forty-five years ago.

 _Words To Live By_ , something or another like that. A catchy title with tons of catches on the screen and geniuses behind it. Euan Lloyd directing; Paddy Chayefsky and Ernest Lehman writing; the cotton candy sweet Kim Novak to swoon over; and the elegant, leggy Lauren Bacall to catch up with during breaks. (Both in a nostalgic and literal way.)

Only the Chevrolet in every driveway gave it away that it wasn’t 1956 anymore. Yakko couldn’t remember the gist of it, but he sure remembered how the sepia-toned film had sat a little too low on the box office’s shelves.

“Lower than Dick’s hat he tried to cover his forehead with during production,” he had quipped in order to keep Wakko and Dot’s spirits up.

He knew that they knew he had been pretty bummed out too when the ratings came back and weren’t the specific double digits they had all hoped for. Not so much Wakko, though. He hadn’t been ashamed of a flop.

He had glowed and paraded about getting to work with THE Richard Widmark, and the man was still alive to say he had escaped the infamous Warner lunacy before it was in style. Before their cartoon had printed it above their heads for the Naughty Nineties.

 _Maybe I’ll gather the gang together so we can send him a letter_ , Yakko thought to himself, grinning at how big of a headache that would give Widmark. _Gotta make sure the kook didn’t permanently retire._

California’s most iconic image, one of the most glamorous places in the world to live, eat, play and shop, continued to sprout up along the highlands the further he strolled. Yakko never understood the mystique of Beverly Hills. It was definitely a place of wealth and beauty—at least that’s what Jack Benny and 90210 had promised him and his sibs. 

He didn’t know where celebrities got their kicks and would love to know what BS led the wave of movie stars to the BH. It certainly wasn’t because of the fresh air and scenery.

So he kept walking. Backtracking where he’d gone to pass where Drew Barrymore grew up on Poinsettia Place; ambling down Melrose Avenue to blow a kiss at the guard at her post for Paramount Studios; and getting mixed up between W. Olympic Boulevard and W. Pico Boulevard. Three glorious options he couldn’t possibly choose from on short notice ranged from the overpriced Charlie’s Fixtures, a deteriorating Dollar Tree, or the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery.

Some of the tombstones and mausoleums he had no idea who the hell was twelve feet underground − Florence Cole Talbert, Lewis Eugene Grigsby, Valentin Wolfenstein. Others he had briefly heard of or seen them in action in the past − Anna May Wong, Marshall Neilan, Joe Marshall.

Yakko did a double take at the familiar names he hadn’t ever realized were buried in the Golden State to begin with. Dooley Wilson, Tim Moore, Hattie McDaniel, Art Tatum…

_Stanley Price, too? Sheesh. What a guy._

Somewhere along Brentwood, he could walk one of the more bucolic and private spreads of a hiking trail. He never needed any personal invitation in Sullivan Canyon, but the legendary gray inside said she was going to start charging him for trampling all over the four acres like he owned the place.

“Didn’t you say that in July, grandmother dearest?”

“The fifteenth of 1955, why yes, I did. I’m surprised you remembered the very month, Urkel.”

Yakko smirked and pulled his pants up to his chin just to spite the former _Golden Girl_. She uncharacteristically but amusingly flipped him off and smacked him in the rear to knock it off.

“Oh yeah, that was two days before Disneyland opened. I remember seeing you smooching with Bob Cummings on live television… No, no, or was that Mae West? Hard to tell with the same birthdays and legs, am I right?”

“You know if he were still around, David Seville would be incredibly impressed that one of his almond-eyed rodents was still squeaking nonsense. Which doctor did you go to in getting that voice a helium touchup?”

“The same one for your face lift.”

Bea let out a single, booming _ha!_ “Then you really got duped, kid.”

Yakko smirked again and did some kind of woe-is-me flop on one of the settees. “My modeling career is ruined.”

The white-haired veteran rolled her eyes and pushed his feet away from the coffee table with her pencil. She made some kind of weird notion with it on a page of the notebook in her hands, then passed it over.

“How is it, by the way? Take a look at what I corrected. The feeling you’ve got now, not your career. Read it overnight, don’t look at it now.”

The top of the toon’s forehead crinkled. “How is it? The feeling? Not my career?”

“What is this, a cave? You know what I mean. The elephant in the room.” At Yakko’s deeper puzzled expression, Bea sighed. “How are you feeling with all of this freedom away from the show, and the cameras and whatnot?”

“Oh.” His brows rose and stayed up for a minute. “I dunno.”

“You know, I had the same reaction to winning Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series back in ’88. The hosts and reporters afterwards kept asking for a glimpse in my head, what was racing through my mind to be acting again at sixty-six. I said, ‘I dunno.’”

Yakko squished his fist into his cheek, chuckling under his breath and poking the throw pillows at his feet with his tail. Of all the tributes to the Ed Wynns and Johnny Carsons of the world, and of all the copycats of the Groucho Marxes out there in the new decade, there was only one Bea Arthur.

And she was sitting right there in front of him with that famous pinched look of hers, fingers resting on her cheekbone and one pantsuit leg over the other. Had she been anyone else, Yakko could have easily lassoed in a quip or two and changed the subject with ease.

But under those Bea(dy) eyes, how was he supposed to turn up the toon charm with someone with just as much television exposure?

“Mm. You’re doing it again.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yakko, I’m not that up in age to not see you spacing out. I know you.”

He loved it when she said his name. Never got it right. It always sounded like “yock-co.” So cute.

“I know you, too, so you should know whenever I space out, there’s not always tragedy on my mind.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Yakko smirked a third time. “I thought you knew me.”

“And I thought you knew where my garbage disposal was,” Bea rebut, right on cue. “But after this riveting conversation, you may have to be reintroduced to it.”

He let out a short laugh through his nose and shook his head, flicking his tail in and out of his palm.

Bea hummed to herself again, tapping her knuckle to her chin. “I know that look.”

“Alright Jeane Dixon, lay it on me. What am I thinking?”

“You’re thinking about your brother and sister.”

Yakko smiled. “Always do.”

“This whole Hollywood scene isn’t as glamorous for you as it was in the nineties. Hell, as it was in the forties − and we had a Second World War, women popping out babies left and right, and a man in a wheelchair leading us.”

“And Frank Sinatra.” Six months before the series’ end and he was gone. Heart attack. America would have gone gaga to see Frankie on _Animaniacs_. Yakko, too.

“Sure,” he heard Bea say just in time before he got lost in memories. “Though you can’t sing your way out of this. Does it have anything to do with animal-main…Annie-may… Your show! You know, ending when it was doing so well?”

“You can carry the name Zbornak just fine for seven years but not _Animaniacs_ for two seconds?” Yakko stuck his tongue out through his teeth at her scowl. “Sometimes, I guess. There were no scandals and we didn’t end on a bad note or anything. Wakko always wanted to do a movie. Boy, was he happy when we got that script in ’99.”

That two-parter North Hollywood spoof didn’t really count as a movie, he thought with a laugh, and he remembered Wakko pulling him aside after shooting to tell him how much hated doing _Variety Speak_. The poor tyke hadn’t thought of himself as the strongest singer of the bunch, what with the accent and all.

Yakko had shrugged and reminded him neither was Vanilla Ice, but he still got his checks.

What a long month that had been. Juggling schedules for all twenty-seven cameos, spot-on line delivery for hours on end when they were losing daylight, costume malfunctions, and all of those song and dance numbers to rehearse.

“It was the best,” Yakko heard himself say. “Everyday we’d break out on the lot and say to Rusty or Ruegger, what’s next? They never failed to make us laugh.” He felt his smile dampen a bit as he hugged a pillow. “I sure hope we made the kids happy, too.”

Bea reached over to squeeze his knee. “Don’t get yourself too worked up, Yakko. To hell with the ratings. You made a name for yourself and you should be proud.”

“I am.”

“Good. Now let’s talk about something else. You’re depressing the hell out of me.”

There really was only one Bea Arthur and Yakko was glad to know her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can totally imagine Yakko being close friends with celebrities like Bea Arthur, and that puts a smile on my face.


	14. Fighting Words

No sooner did Wakko open his eyes than a wave of nausea sucker punch him in the gut.

It wasn’t the type of get-up-and-go icky feeling, like after he’d overeat on a holiday occasion and seriously need to spew. It was more of an awkward hollow patch sitting in his abdomen, not quite heartburn but a bit heavier than indigestion. Like he had a hole in his stomach, but just barely. He hated being a toon sometimes. Their anatomy was all out of whack.

The longer Wakko tried to get comfortable, the more desperate he grew for a glass of water. Or maybe some Pepto. If only his butt wasn’t permanently glued to the seat and more and more people weren’t crammed on every centimeter of space on Route 60 in Los Angeles County.

“This traffic sure is chockablock.”

Scratchansniff glanced up at the rearview mirror, the wrinkles on his forehead furrowing. “What does that even mean?”

“It’s an accent thing. You wouldn’t get it.”

“I have an accent, too.”

“Trust me, I know.” Wakko shuddered. “I’ve heard you sing ‘Don’t Pass Me By.’”

Whether he didn’t understand the slight poke at his thick European accent or he simply chose to ignore it, Scratchansniff returned his eyes to the road, inching forward 0.2 millimeters every twenty seconds. Wakko shook his head and gazed out the window. Too many cars and not enough pavement.

It reminded him a lot of the spectacular road trip back in ’69. After the closing of the animation department in the early 1960s, he, Yakko and Dot had been loaned out to other studios to help their then-studio, a struggling but now defunct Official Films Inc. over in New York, keep making profit. _Animaniacs_ may have put a loony spin on things for a laugh, but it had really happened and one of the loans was to Colombia Pictures.

He remembered they were going to take a stab at the newest comedy-drama, _Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice_.

The Warners were going to be the first of Official Films characters to be included in a strictly human picture, but on their way to the airport that August, their taxi-cab had taken a sharp left into Bethel at the worst possible time. It had been a three day tie-up, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth.

Everyone and their hippie mother had been flocking to the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival, and the New York Thruway had become a stranglehold for more than twenty miles. Many of the motorists after just fifty minutes on day one, including the Warners and even their cab driver, had abandoned their cars and hoofed it.

Wakko sighed aloud, still bummed out thirty-two years later how the three of them never made it to California. A majority of filming had been done there (go fig), Official had gotten a nasty phone call about the debacle, and the next workless decade had been extremely rough on their fannies.

 _It would’ve been neat_ , his conscience suddenly piped up, _if we had gotten to work at least once with Natalie Wood before what happened to her._

He shuddered again. Just a year into the eighties, a team of three about to find work again, and the actress had…ugh, terrible. Simply awful. But the further he thought back, the harder Wakko wished to have been able to work alongside certain celebrities.

Jane Russell, Mary Tyler Moore, Dick Van Dyke, Marlo Thomas, Jeanne Crain. They were all still alive! If only they had been at the right place at the right time in the past, or been given the chance to see them and not parody just a couple of them under Warner Bros.

“Wakko, stop that!”

The toon gave a violent start. “Stop what?”

“You’re grinding your teeth.”

“So?”

“I can hear it over the radio.”

Wakko gave the driver’s seat a bored look and stilled his face, barely feeling the bottom of his teeth quiver and then press against the top. He had his tongue break up the fight and leaned forward to listen. Yep, the radio was on. Light drums and the stringy Georgian twang of Cyndi Thompson entered through one stiff ear and left out the other.

Wakko never pegged Scratchansniff as a country music listener. He thought he’d fancy groups like Simon & Garfunkel or Popol Vuh. Without a second thought, he crawled into the front seat and pointed to the dials.

“Can we listen to something else?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m listening to this song right now.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got to keep myself focused and awake one way or another.”

“Why?”

“Wakko, hush.”

He’d go for broke and hit Scratchy with a fourth if his throat wasn’t so parched from sleeping through a third of rush hour. He had tired himself out after he’d quoted the entirety of _My Cousin Vinny_. Well, not all of it.

Scratchansniff had gone to the lengths of ignoring by actually leaving the car when traffic was at a standstill. He came back seven minutes later, and Wakko had picked up with, “Were these magic grits? Did you buy them from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans?”

When Scratchansniff flat out tuned Wakko out with emergency earplugs, the latter had stopped and forced himself into a second nap. That had been at least an hour and forty-something minutes ago.

“Well, looks like we won’t be going anywhere for awhile,” the psychiatrist sighed out. 

“Thanks, Inspector Morse.”

“Now Wakko, let’s not start with the jokes.”

“I’ll say. John Thaw played him better.”

Scratchansniff scowled but didn’t entertain the quip further. “While we’re both in this traffic, we might as well begin our session.”

Wakko feigned checking a watch and unlocked the passenger door. “Oh, look at that. Children twelve and under cannot legally ride in the front. I’ll turn myself in.”

“You wouldn’t even be the one prosecuted. I would be.”

“I’ll take one for the team. You’re not getting any younger.” Scratchansniff pulled him back by the tail and locked the door. “You know it’s not possible to lock the front passenger window. I can keep going…and going…and going…”

“Yes, yes, _ha-ha_ , Energizer Bunny.” The doctor smudged a hand to his face, grumbling under his breath. “We may not have the couch or a quiet office to talk, but no excuses. We’ll make do.”

“This should be fun.”

“I’ll start off by asking how your journal entries have been going.”

If Wakko couldn’t grind his teeth because Scratchansniff had heard it and was going to chastise him again, he sure could bite the mess out of his tongue and the man wouldn’t even notice. His tail whipped out from under him, unsure of whether to stay still or move to appear natural. Frankly, it looked like a worm needing to be put out of its misery.

Scratchansniff raised a brow. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“How are they going so far?”

Wakko looked out beyond the windshield and shrugged. “I dunno. They must’ve already been on the next interstate out of here.”

“I would say I don’t have time for the monkey stuff,” the doctor slowly began, without a sigh or another grumble or muttered German profanity, “but lucky for you and unfortunately for me, I finally get to say the opposite.” He cut off the music and crossed his arms. “I can wait all day, you know.”

Wakko copied his gesture. “Me too.”

But real life wasn’t a cartoon. There were no cuts and transitions, or dissolves to give the illusion of hours passing. Being stuck in traffic was any human or toon’s worst nightmare come true. If you didn’t have the patience or ability to conk yourself silly with a mallet, forget about it.

Wakko wanted to forget about being stuck in the middle of a rush-hour jam. He tried to ignore it, and he tried to ignore Scratchansniff’s intense staring. He smiled, he waved, he made faces. Scratchansniff wasn’t budging. Wakko spared a look at the dashboard, saw three whole minutes had passed and already he was feeling antsy, and reached out for one of the buttons.

Scratchansniff slapped his wrist. “No radio until you answer my question.”

“Can you ask a different one?”

“Wakko, you don’t have to give me a whole thesis. I just want to know how your journal entries have been faring. Are you learning from them? Does the writing feel therapeutic?”

Wakko figured he’d always had chicken scratch growing up. He knew he wouldn’t like looking at it very much. He numbly shook his head to Scratchansniff’s question, then gave an unnecessary shrug. He wasn’t exactly lying; he wasn’t much of a writer, much less a reader of his own work. He could be a pretty harsh critic…on himself.

_I hate it._

“You hate the exercises?”

“You haven’t seen a single one, so I can say I hate them,” Wakko pointed out, shifting his hat down.

“You’re being hard on yourself. Perhaps if you shared one of them with a friend or one of your siblings, or if you read one out loud to yourself, it wouldn’t seem so bad. Do you mind?”

Wakko shrugged again. “I can’t mind. I don’t have a journal on me.”

“Do you think you could recite one from memory?” Was Scratchy nipping at the cooking sherry? Did he not hear what he said? “How about your most recent entry? It doesn’t have to be the most personal one if you don’t wish to share it.”

“Haven’t done a recent entry.” That should do it.

“That’s not bad. It could be a sign of improvement.” Or not.

“If I had a journal, I’d spell it out for you.” At Scratchansniff’s deeper puzzled expression, Wakko slammed his head into the window. “I don’t have a journal, Scratchy. I never had one. I’ve never done an entry, so I can’t share and I can’t mind sharing something I don’t have.”

The psychiatrist slowly splayed his fingers over the dashboard and pressed his lips together. He turned to look out at the immobile cars and trucks and motorcycles, leaning his head against the leather of the driver’s seat. For a hot second, Wakko thought he’d gone into some weird shock. He tilted his head and poked his knee once, twice…

“What do you mean you don’t−! You’ve been slack this entire time? _Willst du mich veräppeln?_ I assigned that to you four months ago!”

Wakko shrunk away from the sudden loudness.

“You were serious about that?” He mumbled.

“Stop with the jokes. For four months, you mean to say you’ve been doing nothing!”

It wasn’t a question of anger but rather an exclamation of disappointment. Wakko would’ve greatly preferred neither being yelled at in his face. Scratchansniff spit a lot when incredibly ticked off, which was more frequent than many thought and not because of televised Warner lunacy.

“Honestly Wakko, you’d think I was addressing your mentality with a grain of salt. Yes, I was serious. I wanted you to record your thoughts and any disturbances down for a reason. To help you. To figure out what’s been causing you to act so—”

“Insane?”

His ears, pressed to the sides of his head, were still ringing from the volume of the doctor’s harsh tone. He’d never sounded so loud and scalding towards him, in both acting or in the rare moments he was scolding him over something minor. Ever.

“I know that wasn’t what you wanted to hear about the crummy journal,” Wakko went on, “but I didn’t want to do it.”

“Why not?”

He started scratching at his wrist even though it didn’t itch. He stared out the window even though he knew what he’d be looking at for the third time that day.

“Why not?” Scratchansniff stressed. He sounded like he was in a cave and right in Wakko’s ear at the same time.

“Because it made me feel like a…like a patient.”

Scratchansniff shook his head. “You are a patient of mine. A stubborn one, at that,” he added under his breath.

Wakko breathed long and slow. There was a reason he camped out in the sunroom at this time…at this terrible, rude, and late time…His eyes remained fixed on the road, his hands hung limply over his knees, his head swam in a resigned and weary pond…

“Are you crying?”

Wakko’s eyes shifted to the side again. When he blinked, something slid down his cheek. He bit his lip in an attempt to hide any sound that wanted to escape his mouth. It was weird. He didn’t feel sad, so why was he crying? _Sad_. It sounded so childish, like something flimsy, something one should be able to cast off with a joke or the smile of a friend.

So _why the hell was he crying_? In front of Scratchansniff, nonetheless.

“Don’t,” Wakko spat when he felt fingers graze the small of his back. “Don’t touch me. Please. Don’t even look at me.”

He heard somewhere that tears led to sympathy, and sympathy would lead to more tears. He didn’t want to be sympathized by Scratchansniff, no siree Bob. He wasn’t sad, he was just…it wasn’t like he felt hurt, he was more…

“Wakko.” An arm was going around his shoulders. “Wakko, look at me.”

He jumped at how close Scratchansniff was and pushed him away.

“I said don’t! What kind of psychiatrist are you? Baiting my mind and trying to ‘make me’ better by having me do things I don’t want to do. Things that I can’t do! You think for some stupid diary I want to dig in my brain the worst possible memories? For the meanest fights I’ve had with Yakko or keep score how many times I’ve wanted to rip my head off when Dot’s plucked my last nerve?”

Wakko flung open the passenger door. “It’s exhausting, and I don’t want to do it, and you shouldn’t make me!”

His feet hit concrete and he had no idea what he was doing. He could barely hear Scratchansniff shouting after him to come back, get in the car, he was insane (obviously). But he did make out four clear words:

“Where are you going?”

To which Wakko shouted back, with more uncertainty than boiled up anger:

“ _Home!_ ”


	15. What a Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the 15th chapter mark, I wanted to stop and thank each and every one of you, from the bottom of my heart, for reading this story and giving it so much love! 🤎 💙 💖

Dot’s first real break in Hollywood and it had to be ruined by a phone call. She knew it was too good to be true. Stumbling and cursing under her breath with each step, she wondered how much a Burbank attorney would cost in order to win against a justifiable case of strangulation against man. It had to be a man calling and wishing for an early demise. Women knew better.

_When am I ever going to say I got to sleep past six again?_

Dot’s pelvis bluntly thudded against an end table, pushing out an “ _Oh!!_ ” from her mouth that sounded much too close to Joan Rivers after knocking back one too many.

“What?” She growled into the telephone. It kept ringing. “Hello?”

It took her a solid minute to realize it was the wrong one and half a millisecond to swear up and down in her mind for going along with the three-home-phones-is-a-good-idea package. Especially if two of the three were rotary phones to keep the Warners’ fifties vintage high alive and ever nostalgic.

Smothering a yawn with her hand, Dot dragged her feet all the way to the closed-off den before snatching the phone up, mumbling, “Warner Brothers Mortuary. You slay it, we filet it.”

“Nice Dot.”

She blinked in surprise. “Scratchansniff?”

“Yes, dear. How are you?”

“Uh, good.”

She’d been right about it being a man calling, but it was someone she knew and now she felt awkward. Dot hadn’t spoken to Scratchansniff since the wrap party for _Wakko’s Wish_ and a brief hello/how are things/goodbye encounter at the post office three days after New Years. With her active schedule as of late, the thought to send a letter or visit him and his wife during holiday breaks sort of fizzled out. Hearing his voice after what felt like a lifetime made her feel strange.

“You and the Missus?” Dot asked dumbly. She felt like she’d just put a fragment in the air.

“Good, yes.” At least Scratchansniff gave her a fragment right back.

“Nice, that’s nice.”

Dot wound the phone cord around her finger and cleared her throat. Scratchansniff never really had a reason to call their apartment, just like how she and her brothers never really had a reason to schedule an appointment with him when they’d been on the air. They were fine in the head, so why bother seeing him?

_Okay, wow, I’m an ass._

The better question should have been, why did a medical reason have to stop any one of them from catching up on old times with their undisputed father figure? God, Dot was so disappointed in herself.

Scratchansniff had been nothing but kind to them despite how the cartoon painted their relationship. He was, in her opinion anyway, a pretty collected and smart guy. He’d always talked with her. Usually after work hours. Or on set. Or outside a trailer. Or in the cafeteria on Taco Tuesday.

“Dot? Hello? I didn’t want to keep you. I know you’re working again—”

“I’m here, I’m here. Sorry. I was just… Um, what’d you need?”

Scratchansniff this time took a moment or two of silence for himself. Maybe a little longer than how long Dot had kept quiet, and she was about to reassure him that their conversation − if one could even call it that − could carry on in the morning if he was so distracted. The quiet of papers shuffling and what sounded like automated beeping made Dot press the receiver closer. Was he in his office?

“I thought I’d talk about Wakko,” Scratchansniff finally answered.

“I’d rather you not. I haven’t had my coffee yet. Can you call back in eleven hours?”

“I don’t feel this is something to put off. I’m worried about him.”

Dot’s chuckle and attempt to quip “who isn’t” both sounded forced. She licked her lips that had gone bone-dry out of nowhere and moved the phone closer.

“I say that as more of you kids’ go-to figure. Of course I worry and think about each one of you. So does Elisabeth. Now like all doctors, there’s a fine confidentiality that I would think twice about letting slip. If it seems Wakko is stressed, or has his head in the clouds, I know he means well.”

“Okay?”

Dot had already known Wakko for being a million miles away from planet Earth when it came to certain things. His sweet-natured and sensitive habits got him to spazz himself out every once in a while, though not a lot gave him credit. The sensitivity that got in the way also helped him react. He wasn’t too cunning, but he was perceptive as hell.

That was why he was so nice and easily the politest out of the three. Not that she and Yakko were mean. They just ran their mouths a lot.

“…known him for, what is it now, almost fourteen years? But I know that that doesn’t immediately put me in his mind.”

“You wouldn’t like it there,” Dot dryly joked.

“I left messages on the machine”—Dot glanced over her shoulder towards the kitchen with a more up-to-date phone—“but if your mailbox is full or he just hasn’t had time to get back to me, tell him I’m willing to compromise a shorter session next Wednesday. Morning or night. His choice.”

“Session?”

Screw coffee. That woke her right up.

“Just for a short while. An hour or so. I want to get him in before September.”

“Okay.”

A session? Next Wednesday, Scratchansniff said. Morning or night, it was Wakko’s choice. Was she hearing right? She had to be overly tired, yeah, that was it. Staring at scripts and rewrites was going to come back and bite her in the ass. Scratchansniff was saying more, but Dot couldn’t hear him. Her thoughts had circled back to the voicemails he’d supposedly left. She was tempted to see if they were still there, but when she heard herself yawning, she suddenly didn’t want to hear any other voice in her ear unless they were saying—

“Alright then. Goodnight, Dot.”

“Huh? Oh yeah, g’night.”

She didn’t hang up right away, even with the dial tone humming in her ears, and instead stared at the corners of the room. She sat on the closest chair, legs curled under her and phone still in hand. She was wide awake now.

_A session. What kind of session? Is that code for, like, a luncheon or what? Wakko’s going all the way to Scratchy’s office. Why? It’s over forty minutes away from the apartment._

So much was going through Dot’s head as if she was having a conversation with someone. The only problem was she couldn’t verbally express her confusion and curiosity unless she wanted to look and sound like she needed help. She also couldn’t receive an answer to any of her burning questions.

“And if I did, then I’d really need help,” she mumbled, soon giggling under her breath. “You’re crazy honey, go to bed.”

_Eh, after some cheesecake._

Dot fidgeted with her older pink babydoll that may as well have been a ballgown. She still envied Carroll Baker for making it look so good in 1956. She crept under the threshold and halfway past the stairs when she mushed her nose into something. Her first reaction was to kick at whatever she’d bumped into, but she wasn’t expecting it to shout.

“Yakko?”

“It’s okay. There’s been a long series of debates whether toons have them or not.” He gave a thumbs up while stooped over and groaned. “I think you cracked the code.”

Dot winced and helped him up. “Sorry. I didn’t see you.”

Yakko narrowed his eyes. “Wow. No retort to demean my masculinity? You must really be tired.”

“I could never come up with things like that on the fly. That’s why we had writers.” Dot made her way to the kitchen with Yakko on her tail. “And how could I demean something that’s been extinct for decades?”

“There it is. You little she-devil,” he muttered good-naturedly as he switched on the light.

“Well, this isn’t exactly Prada”—Dot kicked up the pink material of the nightie as she took a plate from the cabinet—“but hey, thanks for trying to flatter a girl.”

“I never try.”

“You never succeed, either.”

Dot knew the white chocolate glaze from the cheesecake would be flicked on her nose no sooner had Yakko stepped beside her. She smiled to herself and cut a larger slice while reaching for the tea kettle.

“How come you’re up?”

“Thought I’d celebrate our final day shooting by depriving myself more of sleep.” Dot stared at her plate, left to right, then cut another slice. “You?”

“Apparently I have to write.” Yakko’s voice was a little distant over the passthrough kitchen window. He held up one of the hundreds of journals he hoarded and returned to sit at the table. “I will never understand why these random spikes of energy come for me at four in the morning.”

“Tea usually helps me with that.”

“Nah. I’ll be up all night going if I drink that stuff.”

“Who said this was for you?” But Dot did leave enough water in the kettle for three more cups once she’d finished with her own.

Not much else happened after she’d spoken. No segues to another conversation, no jokes, no looking up. Both brother and sister were engaged in their respective activities − Yakko writing, Dot eating − with the hums of the frigidaire and ticks of the wall clock for added company.

It was nice. Dot missed being home. She missed putting her feet up on the settee with another _That Girl_ marathon on television, or cooking pasta while Frank Sinatra sang to her on the radio, or camping out under her covers with just a flashlight, another Agatha Christie novel, and her secret stash of Ritz Crackers.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d challenged herself to stay up past midnight just because she could and wanted to. She didn’t know if it had usually been Thursdays or Fridays where it was her night to pick up a rental at Blockbuster for Movie Night. She forgot how long it had been since she’d begged/out-cute/threatened to blow his room up whenever Wakko hid her best dresses and there had been a rare celebrity touring the area from the era of Golden Age Hollywood cinema.

Dot had been _thisclose_ to pulling out a stick of dynamite when she nearly missed Eva Marie Saint outside of Orange County. She loved her in _On the Waterfront_.

The last memory made her glance at the phone.

“Yakko, did anyone call while I was gone?”

“Don’t think so. Why?”

“We don’t have anything on our answering machine, do we?”

“Haven’t checked, and again I ask why? Don’t tell me you’re expecting a call from the studio,” he sighed out, finally looking up from whatever needed ten pages of his calligraphy.

“I’ll check, then.”

“Dot, you just got done with production three hours ago—”

She flapped a hand to silence him, already holding the telephone close and sorting through the oldest to newest messages. Telling herself she wasn’t really invading her brother’s privacy because he’d done it to her many times before, like with her diary or listening in to her phone calls…telling herself she didn’t have to feel guilty because she wasn’t a psychiatrist with doctor/patient confidentiality to uphold…telling herself curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back…

Telling herself these things stalled Dot long enough to go through only four useless messages. But then she heard Scratchansniff clearing his throat on the other end, his accented “good afternoon, Wakko,” and then the kitchen door swinging open just about gave her a heart attack. Dot fumbled but hung up fast, whirling around even faster to see Wakko shielding his eyes and dragging his feet over to the cabinets.

“Why are you guys up?” He mumbled.

Dot crossed her arms. “How come you’re up?”

“I asked you first.”

“I asked you second.”

“I asked for none of this.”

Clutching his notebook under his arm, Yakko waved over his shoulder, uttered a single goodnight, and headed upstairs. The comforting quiet Dot had had with him stood at a standstill with Wakko now. He wandered aimlessly around the kitchen, taking swigs from the juice carton, looking through drawers for hard candy, going back to the fridge to toss another grape in his mouth…

“Low blood sugar?”

“No Dot, I just thought I’d maybe stuff my face and prick my finger at 4:57 a.m. because I’m bored.”

 _Low blood sugar_ , she confirmed in her head beside the shopping list she was already putting together for the morning. _It’s been so long since I’ve gone to the supermarket, too. Sheesh._

“You gonna be okay up on your own for a bit?” 

“I’m fine.”

“You need me to stay awake with you?”

“I’ll live.”

Wakko hadn’t moved from his spot, but he wasn’t eating or drinking anything else. Dot crossed her arms again, staring him up and down, but it hardly had an affect on his half-delirious, half-cranky disposition. If she asked another question, she’d get another two-worded answer. If she kept looking at him, he wouldn’t move to take care of his body.

Having no choice, Dot turned away to pour herself another thing of tea, forcing her hand to leave the sugar and skim milk alone for who really needed it. But Wakko still hadn’t moved. Not even when she peeled an orange, held it out, then awkwardly left it on a napkin on the counter for him.

Mumbling goodnight down to her babydoll, Dot silently crossed over to the den and sat in the dark, clutching her cup tight and waiting…and waiting…and waiting until she was absolutely sure she heard Wakko finish up in the kitchen. She didn’t know whether to thank him or hurt him badly when she broke a personal stay-up-late record.

Wakko hadn’t gone back upstairs until 8:03 a.m.


	16. Like Old Times

There was a certain level of tiredness that equated to insanity. For Yakko, it was when he’d like to think it possible to temporarily dislocate himself from his own body. As if he could ask whoever was up there to take him out for just a short while and let him go wherever souls went to be zen or some junk.

With a long exhale, he burrowed deeper under the covers rather than stretching out of them. Drowsiness was eating him up, both physically and mentally. He needed rest, but his mind needed to move. When most humans and toons got to be so drained, stressed, and too tired, they would break off from thinking and relax.

But Yakko? Oh please. He couldn’t think of anything he’d rather spend his last ounces of energy on than figuring out how he could reassert himself into his hexagonal schedule.

So far on his checklist, he had tossed all the caffeine he could tolerate so he wouldn’t drink any before bed; he had locked away his vinyl records in the den and tied the key to four balloons so there’d be no more two a.m. concerts of the Lennon Sisters singing to him; he had resigned his position of Nighttime Clock-Watchman by double knotting five blindfolds over his eyes.

Now as the pale California sun pricked through the blinds, Yakko was tempted to add ‘get a NyQuil transfusion’ to the list. No matter what he did or didn’t do, he still found himself up at the most unpleasant hours of night.

His sigh was almost lost along the _tick-tick_ of the alarm clock showing 12:52 p.m. He felt he had put his head to pillow maybe six hours ago, but somehow his memory of the time was no more than ten minutes. Twenty at most. Had he even gone to sleep? Was he even awake? A dream within a dream perchance?

Against better judgement Yakko poked his eye, and the self-assault immediately placed him as running champion for the golden stupidity. Of course he was awake. He may not have remembered going to sleep at a reasonable hour, but he had closed his eyes at some point and now he was up. That was enough.

The rough binding of a book pressed into his leg made him reach under to bring it out. He gazed almost unseeingly at nine pages of his, for once, neat and clean handwriting.

_Hold the phone. When did I do all this?_

Yakko’s eyes strained to read the stamp-sized date squished in the corner, but all he could make out was that his brilliant word vomit hadn’t taken any Pepto ‘on the 23rd.’ Swell. Every twenty-third of each month he could endlessly celebrate the anniversary of ambiguity. Even February could get into the party. Short little old February that had twenty-eight days to be clear, but twenty-nine in Leap Year.

“Boy, I must be tired. I’m ticked off at a month.” Yakko paused for a beat. “And I’m talking to myself.”

His arms washed cold of goosebumps when he suddenly felt rather than heard someone coming up the stairs. He tugged the blanket over his head and waited for the footsteps to pass his bedroom. He knew it was wishful thinking; they were soon going across the hall, on his carpet, then on his back.

Two fingers peeled open the un-poked eye, and Ringo Starr Jr. decided to ask, “You awake?”

“No.”

“Wake up, then. I need you to drive me.”

Yakko sank further in retreat and turned himself upside down to rest at the foot of the bed. Wakko followed suit and joined him under the covers.

“Got no sleep last night, huh?”

“Gee, what gave it away?”

Wakko’s finger poked his cheek. “Those aren’t Valentino white bags.”

“Good one.” Yakko rested his cheek in the palm of his hand and shrugged. “I gotta do better.”

“You can borrow the joke whenever you want. Sounds like something you’d say more, anyway.”

“Can’t afford it. ’Sides, that wasn’t what I was referring to.”

“What’d you mean then?” And then his Einstein of a brother followed the question up with another spark of genius after Yakko had yawned by asking, “You tired?”

“No, I’m Yakko.”

“You wanna talk?”

“You really think that’s such a good idea? Honda may want to recruit me for how much mileage my mouth’s got.”

Wakko shrugged and moved in closer, unintentionally wiggling one of his ears that struck Yakko’s good eye. _So much for 20/20 vision._

“Like I said, I gotta do better.”

At least this time Yakko physically knew he was going to lose himself in his ranting thoughts. He’d probably make a detour down Memory Lane if he was desperate enough, but on the plus side, he thought, at least he had been given permission to zone out. He closed his eyes, switched his other cheek to his other palm, and with another shrug carried on.

“I dunno, sib. I guess it’s just my thoughts overcompensating for something. Ehhhh, that’s the wrong word for it. But I don’t want to say it’s replacing something, because what that something is, I have no idea. So don’t ask. Though…I think I may have to start getting used to it. Replacing, I mean.”

Yakko huffed out through his nose as quiet as possible and tousled his hair. He’d usually breeze through the point by now, but whatever was fumbling out of his mouth was a major cryptic landslide.

“It’d be a little easier writing all of this down,” he admitted, part of it mumbled so Wakko wouldn’t hear and the other part chastising himself for being so uncommunicative. “I know, me not being able to say something? Better get Barbera Walters on the phone quickly.”

Yakko couldn’t feel himself shrugging a third time but did notice his mouth shifting to autopilot. His ears could hear it still saying something to Wakko—probably something crazy or nothing relevant to what he had first brought up—but he was talking nonetheless. Without a second thought.

That was the problem nowadays, the toon figured. His mouth. It didn’t get him into situations as it had done to the fictionalized troublemaker on _Animaniacs_ , but it certainly hadn’t gotten him any place further than Citra Apartments. It wasn’t so much money Yakko worried about—the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon reruns was an annuity for the trio—but it was more about wasted potential.

So what if he could outtalk a person in a crescendo tone? So what if his fast-talking puns and being the ultimate supplier for most of the adult jokes really cemented the “yak” in his name?

Unless it made him feel accomplished and wanted at the end of the day, Yakko’s smart mouth antics weren’t the same as they used to be eight years ago. Whenever he wanted to converse, it had to be laced with a pun, or wrapped in a 1950s reference, or drowned in a self-deprecating joke. He couldn’t strip the humor out.

It had grown on him like a rash and was going to live with him. No matter how much sincerity, staidness, and seriousness he rubbed on it. Not to say he wanted to be a grouch, it was just that, well…

“So you like writing?”

Yakko opened his eyes. “Say again?”

“Again. But I asked if you liked to write.” Wakko nodded back at the journal by Yakko’s feet. “You keep repeating about all the stuff in your notebooks, and how your hands hurt, and how you’re always staying up late.”

“I said I…?” _Wow, I really gotta watch what comes out my mouth._ “Well, I guess if I did in fact unconsciously utter all of that mumbo jumbo, then yeah. I don’t mind writing.”

“So you don’t mind writing ‘glops of what Hollywood wishes they could sell their money-mongering souls to do’? You don’t mind saying ‘writer’s block can take a flying jump’? Or how your ‘spelling corrector said exigency wasn’t a word but the dictionary said otherwise and someone’s going to get a pie to the face’?”

Yakko snorted and pulled Wakko’s cap down. “I’m more surprised by the fact that you pronounced ‘exigency’ right.”

“I listen.” The way Wakko said it, if Yakko wasn’t mistaken, almost sounded like he was trying to joke around being offended.

He pulled the little guy in closer until their cheeks touched. “Yeah, you really did. Thanks for the ears.”

With another yawn and a lazy roll out of bed that only did more harm than good to his previously assaulted tailbone, Yakko figured it was time to start the day. He’d slept in long enough and didn’t like the feeling of wasting an afternoon away.

“Yakko, can I ask a question?”

“You already did.”

“Okay, then I’m going to tell you something.”

“Did that, too.”

The smart aleck smirked at the humor he had not too long ago been bashing— _Boy, am I a sad hypocrite or what?_ —and stopped outside the bathroom. The smirk flipped upside down when he tried the doorknob twice. Locked.

Wakko clicked his tongue and was most definitely prepared to knock Tchaikovsky up and down the door if his cracked knuckles weren’t a dead giveaway. Yakko stopped him short and whisked a spare ball-point pen from his pocket, opening it up to use the ink cartridge to effortlessly pick the lock.

“Just get in and get out,” he ordered above the shower pipes, Madonna’s “4 Minutes” coming from their portable radio, and Dot’s singing.

With a two-finger salute, Wakko took three steps into the half-steamed room for the cabinet under the sink. Yakko hadn’t even turned his foot to head for the bathroom downstairs when he heard the toilet suddenly flush and a shriek that could give Jamie Lee Curtis a run for her money. Pleased and almost deranged cackles flew out of Wakko’s mouth as he doubled over for a hot second, snatched the towels, and barreled out of the room.

“That’s for last Tuesday!” He shouted over his shoulder.

“You’re not going to make it to _next Tuesday!_ ” Dot growled, shutting the cold water off immediately.

Deciding it best to stay out of private affairs, Yakko turned off the radio and reached under the cabinet for their spare towels. Well, they were more like larger washcloths they’d put on the ground for a wet floor, but Dot was already so small it may as well have been the perfect replacement. He offered it behind the shower curtain and thought for sure he was going to break his neck the millisecond he got yanked forward.

“Hey, hey! Wrong brother!”

The assault by conditioner and loofah ceased. “Where is he?”

“Just dry off first and mutilate your brother later. You want me to get your…huh. You need me to see if I can… _heh-heh_ …”

A massive shampooed and stringy wreath of black hair puffed out like a mushroom on Dot’s head. Yakko knew he was asking for the death penalty just by trying to hold in his laughs. The glare deepening and the loofah slowly being brandished didn’t help his sister’s appearance.

“Phyllis Diller…” Yakko snorted under his breath. “Big fan. I loved seeing you on _The Love Boat_.”

One big mouth stuffed with a loofah later, Yakko was scrubbing the taste out with boiling water. And Absolut Juice Apple, lemon juice, honey, and cinnamon. He needed something to get a head start on the missed seven or so morning hours, as well as hammering out that weird buzz in his head. His day hadn’t officially started and already he was anxious that he hadn’t finished an errand or that he forgot to do something.

“Wait a sec, Wakko…didn’t you say you needed me to drive you somewhere?”

Across from the passthrough kitchen window, Wakko shrugged and raised the television remote. “Only twenty-one minutes ago.”

“Forgive me if I have the mind of a sixty-something-year-old at times,” Yakko apologized with a dramatic bow. “Where you headed?”

“The Huntington Center.”

Yakko almost spat out his drink. “Huntington? That’s all the way in Orange County, you know.”

“I know.”

“You do realize that’s over two hours from the apartment with rush hour, right?”

Wakko nodded. “Right.”

“And that we have perfectly fine retail centers here in Burbank, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Yakko smudged a palm to his face. _I knew I should have gone for the Absolut Vodka._ “Is it worth asking what you plan on doing there, Monsieur Blasé?”

“Wakko needs a ride?”

Yakko peeked out between his fingers to see Dot entering the room, the events of the bathroom escapade already taken care of. The lingering taste of conditioner in his mouth and the slight bump on Wakko’s head was solid proof. Dot glanced at Yakko first, running a comb through her tamed hair, then turned to Wakko for an answer.

“Not with you,” he loudly denied, shaking his head so hard Yakko was surprised he didn’t give himself whiplash.

Dot crossed her arms. “And just what exactly is wrong with my car?”

“Nothing. It’s just that you drive like Mr. Magoo.”

This time Yakko did spit out his drink and steadied himself over the counter, doubled over in laughter.

“Well if you’re driving with Yakko,” Dot began, throwing a thumb over her shoulder, “tell him to toss the Bobby Vinton records. I have enough trouble staying awake at the wheel when I’m called in for script approval.”

“You have somewhere to be, too, sis?” Yakko asked after wiping a single tear and taking the necessary deep breath to not heatedly defend his taste in music.

“No. It’s just been a while since you’ve been her chauffeur,” Wakko cut in, sticking his tongue out when Dot threw her comb at him and missed. “Time on the road isn’t the same for her when she can’t yell at you to—”

“— _go!_ It’s a stop sign, Yakko, not a line at the DMV!”

The transition couldn’t have been executed any smoother. Instead of those words being a teasing jab at a memory from long ago, Dot said it with such raw annoyance and irritability that one would think she was in labor. It wasn’t Yakko’s fault he liked to abide by the rules of the road and drive like a grandpa. Folks could not drive in L.A.

“Okay, I regret sneaking and drinking whatever you had behind your back.” Wakko groaned and bopped his head against the seat. “I have to go.”

Yakko spared a glance and looked to the left of the intersection. “Roll down the window.”

“It’s not gonna come out the way it went down.”

Sheesh, Yakko couldn’t eat or drink anything special around his bottomless pit of a brother. And if he thought back a little further, he also couldn’t take a proper shower in the mornings without choking on Chanel No. 5. He tried but failed to remember the last time (save for this afternoon) where he’d gotten a chance to stay in bed all day without being called for or jumped on.

He shuddered just thinking about the times an ungodly concoction was brimming or baking to life whenever Wakko’s hypoglycemia took the reins. He felt like the VCR stuck in one place, constantly repeating day and night that Dot had “better be holding all of that for a friend,” because she certainly wouldn’t be modeling Roy G. Biv on her face.

And all of the pushing, and the shoving, and the scratching of the neck for the past million or so years… For the love of Spielberg, Yakko didn’t want it any differently. He really hoped it stayed that way around him and his sibs. He felt so grateful being part of such a good, well-loved family.

“Oh my God, Yakko, there’s no other cars! Who’re you waiting for, Casper the Friendly Ghost?”

“Were you actually serious about rolling down the window?”

“Dot, yelling at me isn’t going to make me go any faster. On the road, I have anxiety.”

“For slow drivers, I have short tolerance.”

“For the life of me, I have to potty.”


	17. Humanity

**September 11, 2001**

There was a time Wakko hadn’t watched the news for six months. Not even once. He couldn’t remember what had turned him away from tuning all broadcasts out or handing the newspaper to Yakko with his eyes closed, and frankly he was glad he couldn’t remember right away.

Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than what was happening ten states away.

Wakko would sometimes remember how painful it had been just glancing at the remote or get a foul taste in the back of his throat when he’d hear words whispered on the streets. It brought over the anxiety the memories had caused, but thankfully not the memories themselves.

He wasn’t stupid to all of the bad things that had happened in the previous decades. Ones he had been alive for but not necessarily involved in. He was grateful enough to escape a market crash, propaganda filming for a second World War, a very bleak Black Monday, and a massive quake back in January 1994 by the skin of his teeth.

But now there was no escape. The television sat in the center of the living room like an unwelcome mirror, turned on to a horror movie. The scariest thing the toon had seen since _The_ _Blair Witch Project_. Wakko tried not to look in its general direction, but with it off the reflected mess in the room seemed so much worse than the real thing.

Television should have meant fantasy, looking at the lives of others, _The Andy Griffith Show_ marathons. Not a twisted, gaping tube you were forced to stare at and see a poor copy of your own disoriented form. Wakko’s foot tapped, his cheeks felt tight, and then almost without a conscious thought he picked up the remote and sat back, mind on a knife edge once more.

It was horrible. Wakko had never felt so afraid for the world, for Yakko and Dot, for their home—and they were completely out of the hate zone. The day hadn’t started that spectacularly. Dot had left early for errands, unintentionally waking Wakko with the front door slamming shut which caused the Domino Effect that since one Warner brother was up, no mercy for the second one.

_7:38 a.m._

How he managed to get Yakko up and at ’em, Wakko couldn’t remember; he’d been too busy running away from one of his loafers. Or had it been a vacuum duster? Whatever Yakko slept with as an emergency burglar deterrent was his business.

7 _:56 a.m._

Dot had left a note saying she didn’t know how long she’d be gone and for the boys to eat without her and to make sure they ate, or she’d “raise hell.” Yakko thought it’d be nice to make something from scratch for once. Wakko had never heard of _œufs cocotte_ , and by the time the kitchen made a Jackson Pollock painting look clean, he vowed the first chance he got he would fly to France and apologize to Lionel Jospin for the abomination he and his brother tried to recreate—followed by multiple bad egg puns.

_8:17 a.m._

The one good thing about getting up early in the morning was that there was guaranteed to be reruns of the classics. _Hazel_ , _I Dream of Jeannie_ , _Bewitched_. Ironic how a former cartoon star wasn’t that big on cartoons but lit up whenever he caught the old but gold of the 1960s.

_8:39 a.m._

Wakko still regretted thinking to himself, _somebody better have died_ , when the flash of EMS workers under a Breaking News bulletin nearly gave him a heart attack. For a second he had presumed the partly collapsed carnage being shown wasn’t in America. It couldn’t have been. America was their home. The land of the free and home of the brave. He actually wanted Yakko, who had been half-asleep on the couch at the time, to start singing his “Nations of the World” song just to name a country, any country, that wasn’t theirs. Because there was no way…

“Oh my God, Wakko, that’s in New York.”

…it was happening in their country.

The smoke and fire, the plane, the debris and bloodcurdling screams was all happening in Manhattan. Yakko had snapped awake and practically whispered for Wakko to call Dot. He wanted her home _now_. Wakko thought he’d heard him saying that but refused to move. He thought his heart had stopped and barely felt Yakko jumping off the couch to speed into the kitchen for the separate home phone.

_He had to call Dot? Why? She didn’t deserve to watch this. No way!_

The ongoing news was swirling in one hollow ear and jamming against the other numb one. It was going nowhere. Wakko barely caught the sound of Yakko shutting the passthrough shutters and snatching the phone off its cradle. He really wished he could work in some loony pizzazz and contact whoever was watching from above. Wakko definitely wanted Him or Her or Them to _please_ , _just stop this_ , _no more fire and no more screams_.

He also wanted to ask whoever was in the kitchen to kindly return his big brother, because whoever was talking on the phone was not Yakko Warner. This one sounded so helpless. Exhausted. Speechless. He kept mumbling into the phone, saying things like ‘no,’ ‘when,’ or ‘help.’

This wasn’t happening in California, or in Oregon, or in Nevada, but what difference did that make? It was happening. All of the scrambling and falling was live. All of the firefighters and ambulances and crying mothers were live.

Wakko had to watch, full screen right on the television, as another plane barreled into the Twin Towers. _Live_. Humans were doing this. Humans were being so unkind and destructive so early in the morning. The young toon created to make people laugh and smile hid his eyes behind his trembling palms and his face in his knees. He was so close to throwing up, so close to screaming.

What was this hatred he was seeing? Did humans really get this upset when they didn’t get their way? What had called for this to happen?

Wakko had only ever seen explosions in movies or smoke in cartoons, but he knew they were just special effects and nobody really got hurt. Or died.

The phone saved him from dry heaving for the fifth time. All the feeling in his arms and legs was numb, like they’d been shot with Novocain and flattened with a rolling pin. Wakko strained his tail to flip the telephone off the rotary stand before his brain shouted at one of his hands to pick it up.

“Come get me. Please. My legs are shaking. I can’t walk.”

Dot. He never called her like Yakko told him to. Wakko didn’t know where she was or how she had even heard of the terrors in Manhattan, but hearing her voice didn’t make him feel any better. He hadn’t listened.

Why hadn’t he listened to what Yakko told him to do? How could he have been so stupid? Apparently he needed it to be spelled out in front of him; Yakko had wanted Dot home immediately so she wouldn’t be exposed to something all at once. Something without any warnings, without any gentle or reasonable segues. She could act like a grownup all she wanted, but she was still their baby sister to protect.

And Wakko had let her down because he had been so afraid.

“I was just passing some restaurant or bar…I don’t know. I thought I saw someone I knew inside and then all the TVs just cut and went to some plane crashing…”

Dot was only fourteen minutes up the road, and Wakko didn’t know whether to find this relieving or depressing. She hadn’t taken her car. She had wanted to walk, enjoy the morning, get out of the house and just live. Yakko had been too out of it to search for the car keys and practically dragged Wakko down the flights of stairs once he told him where she was.

“I…I don’t know what I saw. I really don’t. I don’t know.”

When Dot said her legs were shaking and she couldn’t walk, she meant it. Yakko had to carry her through a parking lot.

“Scratchansniff wasn’t answering. I went to seven different pay phones and he wasn’t answering.”

It was the first time Wakko could look at her the second they found her huddled on a bench outside of a Target. He blindly heard himself ask, “Why were you trying to call him?”

The look Dot gave him made him feel stupider, but the response made all the blood and ink in him run cold and dry at the same time.

“Because he and Elisabeth were going to New York!”

No, no, oh no, that was incorrect. Scratchansniff wasn’t one for travel. He was old. He didn’t have time to travel. He spent so much time in Burbank in that stuffy office, talking to crazy people and asking “and how does that make you feel?” He hadn’t answered any of Dot’s calls because…because he thought it was a collect call. He was taking a nap. He was with another patient.

Another patient that wasn’t Wakko. He knew Scratchansniff had wanted to see him before September for one last appointment. Was that why? Because he wanted to talk to him before leaving? Because he and his wife had been planning on flying to New York and he just wanted his last appointment of August to be with someone he liked?

Wakko didn’t know when he stopped walking. He didn’t know how he could still hear Yakko calling his name six feet away when it felt like six miles away. He didn’t know how hard he could throw up, or how loud Yakko’s screams could get, or how fast Dot’s legs had healed to run over. He just kept saying “I think I did it” under his breath, never one to make sense before and not wanting to explain himself now.

Wakko had to be the one in Yakko’s arms like an incapacitated patient, he had to be the one having his hand squeezed by Dot like a disoriented patient, he had to be patient and not jump to conclusions because he hadn’t done anything…and that was probably what did it. He did it. He got Scratchansniff—

Screaming. Who was screaming? Well, it was more of a shriek mixed with a gasp and cough, but someone was making a lot of noise. Wakko raised his throbbing head from the living room chair he had been in for some time to see Dot by the rotary phone. Her fist was clenched against her temple, she was biting her lip hard enough to bruise, and her eyes were squeezed shut.

“You’re…I can’t even do…why were…”

Wakko sat up a little more. “What? Who is it?”

“ _Scratchansniff_.”

He just about swallowed his tongue.

“H-he’s okay. Elisabeth’s okay. They’re okay. Yakko!”

Wakko slowly bent backwards until the arm of the chair was prodding him in the kidney. He pressed his hat over his nose and mouth, purposely breathing shallow. He was about to knock himself silly like he was losing a round of Go Fish against himself. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a sick practical joke. Scratchansniff was okay.

Wakko promised then and there he was never going to miss another appointment. He’d go to all the Michaels and Best Buys and Wal-Marts in Burbank and demand their entire stock of journals. He wasn’t going to complain the next time Dot needed to go over another script or make so many jokes about Yakko’s handwriting whenever he saw him at the writing desk.

Eight hours after the attacks the Warners huddled on the couch to watch Donald Rumsfeld declaring how the “Pentagon is functioning,” and soon Bush’s address to the people at 8:30 p.m. brought a visible storm cloud over Yakko, another wave of nausea inside of Wakko, and tears to Dot’s eyes.

They never realized how strong hate could change a person or a toon. Hate not always directed to you, but onto others. Hate directed on your entire country, your home. America had experienced and seen a great evil unlike any other. It was going to be a day no one could forget if they tried.

That September may have brought out and taken away the humanity in so many hearts, but it certainly wasn’t going to destroy any hope the Warners were still clinging to. Together, they would be brave and learn to live on.


	18. Life Giving

“Is it in?”

“It would’ve been eight minutes ago if you stopped biting me.”

Yakko could make jokes or get burnt up all he wanted. Dot wasn’t going to take her eyes off that needle for a second. She hated them so much. Blood she was fine with seeing. Ink, why not? She was made of the stuff and probably a hundred other substances she couldn’t pronounce unless they were also in a candy bar.

But needles? Dot shuddered and involuntarily kicked Yakko’s shin when the cool burn pressed against her wrist for the twelfth time. It got too close to comfort this time, and if she hadn’t been paying attention it would’ve taken more than the required amount. She wasn’t a doctor, but she presumed she needed all of it to stay alive.

“Stop shaking,” Yakko said through gritted teeth.

“Stop talking!” Dot snapped. “You’re supposed to be striking the vein, not a conversation.”

She watched the needle realign and held her breath the moment she felt the slightest bite on top of her forearm this time. When she felt squirming under the fur, she mushed Yakko away and rolled down her sleeve.

“I changed my mind. Do my right arm.”

Yakko turned to his side, pointing with the accursed object. “Can I sit on her?”

The nurse originally assigned to draw the ink/blood shook her head in amusement. “I don’t think so.” She stood up, giving another phony smile and circling to Dot’s side. “Now Dorothy—”

“Unless I’ve got on ruby slippers or have a mother from Sicily, I think I’d prefer being called Dot.”

The nurse was either a saint with ticked off patients or it was just about the end of her shift. Either way, she gave another smile and giggled under her breath.

“I get it honey. Not many people or toons are fans of needles. Heck, it took my personal doctor another four years after medical school to outgrow his discomfort around them. He just hated the things, but he really wanted to help his community and thought it was silly if he couldn’t even look at one.”

The woman in navy blue rolled up Dot’s sleeve and switched the tight elastic band to the right limb. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll barely even feel it.” She thoroughly cleaned the targeted vein with an alcohol pad and placed her cold fingers on Dot’s shoulder. “Now, you said you wanted your right arm?”

“Yeah, and I want Yakko to do it.” If he could do that fancy needlework with Wakko’s glucose, Dot was pretty sure it wouldn’t be difficult to draw what was in her. Right?

“Really dear, it’s not so—”

“Lady, I already told you I’m one dotted ‘I’ and two crossed ‘Ts’ away from filling out a Cease and Desist.”

Yakko peeked out from his fingers from an unseen face-palm. “Dot…”

“ _Shh!_ Focus on the pointy, sterile thingamajig before I change my mind.”

“Alright, that’s it. Nurse, could we have some time alone? Me and my sister, not us. Although I can make seven o’clock reservations next Thursday,” he finished with a suave snap of the fingers and a charming grin.

The nurse giggled again, ruffled the try-hard’s hair, and left the pair alone.

Dot rolled her eyes. “She’s, like, fifteen years your senior.”

“The older the wine, the better it tastes. What’s your point?”

“Boys…” She noted the unsettling quiet and swallowed hard. “Did she really mean that? Will I barely even feel it?”

Yakko took her hand to squeeze. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

“But I want to.”

What she had seen on TV petrified her. Dot couldn’t imagine what was running through people’s minds when they saw their beautiful New York being abused and stripped from them. The day after had to have been rougher. How could anyone think of going back to work? How long would the state grieve? Would they lose hope?

In the days following the attacks, Dot had selfishly wished she had been anywhere but home doing something. Film blocking, reading a screenplay, begging to have Martin Scorsese direct for Warner Bros. again. Anything to keep her mind busy and her heart whole. With a hollow schedule and a more hollow feeling in her chest for three days straight, she had nothing but time on her hands to think about what had happened in Manhattan, the painful anxiety she’d get whenever hearing a plane overhead, and how she couldn’t directly go out and help. 

She’d read how a large combination of human and toon police and rescue workers from around the country were taking leaves of absence from their jobs to travel to the east coast in order to help recover bodies from the twisted remnants of the Twin Towers. Businesses and celebrities were already setting up immediate relief funds to assist the victims, and blood donations had begun to surge across the states, too.

Thus leading an internally screaming Dot through the doors of their nearest American Red Cross.

So far it looked as though Wakko was going to spend the rest of the week in Scratchansniff’s office, and as if Yakko already didn’t spend his time up at the crack of dawn, he had been feverishly arranging to have their next few annuity checks sent out. Once Dot had heard of what the essential workers were going through, she wanted to make their jobs a little easier and donate whatever was pumping through her body to give to the handful of toons that had been unfortunate victims, as well.

_But the needle…_

“You’ve been quiet a little too long. If it were me in this chair, you’d run out to celebrate.” Yakko squeezed her hand again. “Sis, if needles make you this tense, it’s okay to say no.”

“I said I want to and I’m going to. I just…” Dot fumbled with the words in her head and stared down at the tourniquet clamped to her arm. “I’ll be fine. Honest. Call the nurse back in before I really change my mind.”

She grimaced when Yakko pinched her cheek and held her breath a second time when the brunette returned, still all smiles and unnecessarily sunny when she asked, “Right then, are we ready Dorothy?”

“Dot is.”

The arm was re-cleaned, re-tightened, and a new needle was brought out to sweep up some leftover nervousness and throw it all in Dot’s face. She looked to Yakko on her left, refusing to blink, move, or breathe at this point.

“You’re fine. Doing just fine,” he told her, patting her hand.

When the needle slipped under the skin, she resisted the urge to backhand the lying broad’s face. That was more than a pinch! Did she just tear through her entire arm? Dot was going to commit a felony. She wanted to smack the receptionist through the roof for tricking her into the chair and letting some stranger nearly butcher a limb. She was going to sue.

“Sis. Dot? Hey honey, look at me.” Dot slowly glanced from the wall to Yakko. How long had her fist been shaking? “Look, you’re doing fine. The needle’s already in, no problem.”

“ _It what?_ ” Yakko actually had to restrain her when she did a quick take to her arm and almost threw herself out the chair. “Why did I look? I’m not doing that again. Stupid. Does it look bad? Don’t answer that. What came first, the blood or the ink? Actually, no, don’t answer that, either.”

Dot stared at the ceiling, tapping her heels together and breathing softly through her nose. There was something in her arm. There was actually something in her arm, like an itty-bitty silver vampire or some pencil-thin leech taking all that it wanted. The good thing was she couldn’t exactly feel the needle under her skin, and she clumsily collected her previous thoughts that they had most likely exaggerated the initial prick.

As long as what the nurse had said was true, then Dot felt okay if she could barely feel anything. Not good, but okay. When a second spout of quiet sprung up, she leaned over to Yakko and whispered, “Am I donating?”

He snickered. “Yes. You’re donating, sis.”

“Oh.” Dot nodded and returned to looking at the ceiling. “Good to know.”

She was in the chair for ten minutes and on her feet for less than two before she had to be scooped up by Yakko. If she had to feel like their first television back in 1937 every time she donated, she was going to need better reception on the next needle. As she was carried into the parking lot and strapped in the passenger seat of Yakko’s car, Dot did have to smile.

The perks of doing the deed at Red Cross—aside from the free cookies and juice, the cool red band crisscrossing her sore arm, and the cute kitten sticker shouting “I donated!”—was the sense of accomplishment and permanent (albeit loopy) smile. She severely debated if she’d return in a week or two so she could keep donating, but then she thought on the bright side, _hey, if I get paid for another minor film, I can help the city in another way._

“Are you gonna do Red Cross, too Yakko?”

“I’ve been thinking about it. Not today, though. Maybe in a couple days or so.” Yakko spared a glance to his side. “How we feeling?”

“Okay.” Dot held up the Juicy Juice in a silent toast. “I love this stuff.”

“I’ll talk to our dealer for some coupons if it’ll please you.”

“Please do.”

Dot relaxed into the worn seat, lazily watching from the window as the car tooled along doing 40 in pretty light traffic. Pretty soon there was a strange quirk in the weather; a couple kilometers south a cloudburst was passing. Dot felt Yakko changing lanes while her eyes were closed in a partial nap, not minding the collective bumps as the wheels turned over a little rise in the street.

It was actually helping her fall asleep, but the muffled chirps coming from behind didn’t take kindly to that. Groaning, Dot unbuckled her seatbelt and half-crawled, half-tumbled onto the car floor of the backseat.

“Is it really that important?” Yakko muttered.

“I know. Shame on me for being so reckless in a moving car doing fifteen under the speed limit.” Dot put a palm to her forehead. “The stunts I do. Eat your heart out, Tom Cruise.”

Ignoring the brotherly concern and annoyance bearing at the back of her head, she searched in between and under the seats until she found the handbag, and soon her ringing Motorola, she’d left behind for the Red Cross appointment.

“Hello?”

“Okay, good, I thought I’d have to send out a search party. Busy morning?”

Dot rolled her eyes and lounged on the backseat. “What do you want, Dean?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard this news by now. I’m still reeling from it, and the studio is especially fresh with shock.” The agent sighed a little too dramatically into the phone, then cleared his throat. “They’ve postponed and shuffled some projects around but should be back in operation by the end of the month.”

“We sure are troopers.”

“Why do you sound like that? Have you been drinking?”

Dot glanced at the bright green juice box in the cupholder and smirked to herself. “Yup,” she teased, popping the _p_.

“You’re joking, right? Please tell me you mean ‘drinking’ as in Seltzer water or… No, you know what, forget I asked.”

“I’m just glad I’m not puffed up on laughing gas. I’d probably find this whole thing hysterical.”

“I treat your image and representation with the best of recognition. You know this, right?”

Dot stuck her tongue out to no one in particular and raised a heel-less foot in the air, momentarily wondering where it had gone and when it had slipped off. _Recognition_. Sure, sure. It had been an honor being out of focus in the background with a cue to blink, smile, or go “mm-hm” for the entirety of 2000 and halfway into 2001. All those “roles” had made cameos seem long and overbearing.

“Dean hon, don’t give yourself a panic attack trying to outdo your own ego,” Dot advised, staring at her right arm. She smiled. “I just got some work done, so calm down.”

There was a long beat of silence before the man sighed again and sounded like he was ruffling up his shirt. Or probably his tie to strangle himself. Good. Sometimes he talked too much and needed to shut up.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, either.” Dot snorted under her breath. “However you toons operate your bodies is your business. Now listen doll, there’s a benefit tonight at Communications Hill, all in cahoots with studios overseas, script investments, another Beverly Hills divorce in _People…_ ”

She could hear Dean trailing off, but that was only because her mind was off hiking elsewhere. If her arm wasn’t so sore and she didn’t have to keep the band on for one more day, Dot would’ve plopped herself in a nice, hot bath. She was extremely drowsy after Red Cross, no sleep after the televised horrors, and constantly arguing with herself for sneaking downstairs to have another slice/piece/bowl of whatever was last left in the fridge by her brothers.

She truly thought it was it after Carmel. It hurt to think how she wasn’t entirely perched on the film acting branch to relax however she wanted. Sooner or later Dean would come running with another audition or gas her up for an offer in Santa Barbara, and it would be another four and a half months (maybe longer) of going back and forth with plot holes, lead changes, weather troubles, budget scares…

“…or seven other. It’s unmistakably Hollywood, yes, but when you look at the positives, this is something that will fan out fantastically.”

“I wish you’d stop talking.”

Dot happened to glance up to see Wakko now in the car. She didn’t know when Yakko had stopped the car and didn’t even know they were picking him up. When he turned around, looking confused, she smiled and rolled over, pressing the phone closer.

“I already told you, I had work done. My arm is sore and the nurse said it’d be another 48 hours before I feel less sh…crappy.”

Wakko nodded. “Good choice.”

Dot glared. “Shut up.”

“Don’t make me turn this car around,” Yakko warned.

“Dean, I’m not going to some stupid benefit that only cares about glorifying big names when this country feels so small. I don’t need others seeing me doing good deeds. Can’t I do them on my own?”

“And I am in no way trying to be superficial or even heartless when I say that, Dottie baby”—Dean sighed a third time—“we all have to get back on track with work at some point. Of all the names I’ve represented, you always make it clear you have to have more of a shove than a push, and once the fog lifts, you know this will apply even greater.”

_He’s not saying it. I know he’s not saying it._

“Don’t just think of this benefit as lending a hand to another coast, but as a way of getting the projects on your belt out there for all of the Coppolas and Herzogs that’ll be there. You won’t regret it.”

Dot’s tongue pushed against the front of her teeth while her hand tightened so suffocatingly over the phone, she was sure Dean could hear her gloves protesting.

“Are you kidding me?” She muttered.

“Listen, I know—”

“No, you don’t know. You don’t know how much this whole thing has thrown me off. You don’t know what I’ve been doing these past few days. You don’t know if we had friends that could have died or did die, or stand-in family members that could have died or did die. You should be so lucky I haven’t hung up yet. Like this.”

Dot ended the call before Dean could attach any other bull to his cut off “wait.” She caught the red band in the reflection as she leaned her head on the window and sighed. There were points to all ends of an argument, some she could see and some she couldn’t, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

No matter how badly she wanted to ignore them.

“Yakko?”

“Yeah, sis?”

“How soon can I make another appointment for Red Cross?”


	19. Hear Me, but Don’t Speak

Staring straight ahead, only half-aware of a world outside the soft leather around him and the power of the car, Yakko’s hands drummed on the wheel, almost soundless against the pattern of traffic. Every so often his eyes hopped over to his left at the changing scenery of the increasingly residential Los Angeles to a peaceful and quiet atmosphere out of downtown.

Things around the apartment had been…uneventful, to say the least. Not that he and his sibs needed to be doing a 9-to-5 or had to be rushing around Burbank doing errands in order to be productive. Yakko liked to think that if he was able to do at least one thing he’d been wanting to do all day, even if it was just measuring out the coffee pot correctly, then he had been productive.

But he had to admit that for the past fourteen days things had dulled into the same collective routine. Whoever got up first got dibs on the bathroom or had breakfast duty. The second runner-up could hog the newspaper or the television all they wanted. The last sorry sucker didn’t even know what day it was. Sometimes the pattern broke; it was nice when Dot could sleep in, and whenever Wakko took a stab at making something from scratch, it usually turned out decent.

Lately now, whenever the three went their separate ways, well, Yakko wasn’t sure how to feel. They had their own interests, their own lives, and different schedules. One could be out, two could be home, two could be out, one could be home. It was nothing new but strange to think it was. Time alone to do whatever should have felt wonderful.

It should have.

So as he drove down Interstate 8, Yakko supposed in the past couple of weeks he had just missed making memories together. A trip to the movies, popping into an arcade, flying kites, going fishing. Nothing wrong with being old-fashioned, he constantly argued anyone who dared debate him on that. Missing all of that, especially with his brother and sister, was the only thing he could put his finger on that made sense for his buffering attention and a crumbling motivation as of late.

“Are we anywhere near wherever we’re going?”

Yakko rolled his eyes at Wakko’s tone, like he’d been dragged into the car kicking and screaming and had tired himself out. The bored-looking toon slouched in the passenger seat, fiddling with the radio dials but not actually changing the station.

“I already told you where we’re going.” Yakko slowed as he approached a traffic light. “At least six times, might I add?”

“Tell me again. I wasn’t listening.”

“And you think I think you’re going to listen for the seventh time?”

Wakko started entertaining himself by sliding the window up and down, then did a double take and asked, “Wait, what?”

“My point exactly,” Yakko mumbled and glanced up at the rearview mirror.

He could see Dot’s brows wrinkled slightly in either confusion or concentration down at her lap, and that got him smiling at how adorable it looked. When he adjusted the mirror, he saw that whatever she was staring at was hidden behind her purse. Yakko’s smile wiped clean off and he reached backwards.

“Phone away.” His ears caught the startled gasp, objects clacking together, and something not too kid-friendly said behind his back. “I’m a son of a what now?”

Dot looked up as she shoved her purse under the seat. “Huh?”

“I also scared the what out of you now?”

The whites around her cheek reddened a bit, screeching to a halt to spread any further when Wakko muttered in a sing-song tone, “Somebody’s gonna get it.”

Dot kicked his seat. “Shut the—” Her eyes snapped up to Yakko, his frown getting ready to dip into a warning scowl. “—window. It’s cold in here.”

Wakko tilted his head around. “Cold? It’s like an oven in here.”

“Hush. Yakko, where are we even going?”

“Does anybody listen to a word I say? Am I just yakking for my health? You guys think I like hearing the sound of my own handsome voice?”

Had the moment been something out of a sitcom, the three beats of silence followed by both Wakko and Dot asking “what” would have sent Yakko laughing. But he couldn’t tell if they were genuinely ribbing him or purposely being rude and tuning him out. They also hadn’t heard the quip at the end of his question so he could ease himself out of starting any unnecessary fights. Things were already off to a rocky start.

The rest of the car ride Yakko drove in silence, Wakko attempted to play “I Got You Babe” with the window, and Dot rustled around in her purse. Twenty minutes later, the tall swaying palm trees and the pristine, park-like setting of Chula Vista Yacht Harbor gradually sailed into view. It was a boaters fantasy come true and a total paradise for Californians with its uncrowded waters pioneering the South Bay.

Wakko and Dot didn’t say anything when the car parked and shut off, but once Yakko went around to the trunk and sounded like he was struggling, that was the two’s cue to join his side.

“Don’t tell me you actually pulled something getting this out,” Dot deadpanned, holding up a wicker basket with her pinky.

“Just making sure you guys were paying attention.” Yakko’s arms were full of other odds and ends that weighed more than him, but he didn’t break a sweat and closed the trunk with his foot. “I’m pretty sure if I sounded like I was having a heart attack, you wouldn’t even blink.”

Dot rolled her eyes. “Oh please. When you were choking that one time, I was there to help.”

“You told me to ‘die quieter’ because you couldn’t hear the TV.”

“It was Shannen Doherty’s last appearance on _Charmed_. There will never be another Prue.”

“Okay, I’m confused.” Both looked over to Wakko who had produced a map from either his hammerspace or the trunk. “Is this really San Diego? Did we make a left at Burlingame or something?”

Yakko was already making his way over to a clearing not blocked by too many fishing boats. The sun was still relatively high, and the sunset wouldn’t be for another hour and fifteen minutes.

“Just because you’re so used to all those conventions and the highway,” he started saying, propping up a tiny parasol, “doesn’t mean something beautiful like this doesn’t exist. C’mon you two, look around. Chula Vista is for everybody.”

Wakko blinked. “Churro what now?”

Yakko chose to ignore that. In no time he had set up three folding chairs, a couple towels to sit on, and a large red cooler loaded with whatever hadn’t yet spoiled in their fridge. He was unhooking a pair of sunglasses from his pocket when Wakko and Dot finally strolled up to him, gazing around as if they were on Mars.

“No one’s going to bite you,” he told them. “There’s hardly anyone here, so sit back and relax. It’s a dock, not a penitentiary.”

“A dock we know nothing about,” Dot pointed out. “Are you trying to tell us something?”

Wakko still had the map in his hands and was turning it every which way. “Or punish us?”

“Because if you are,” Dot continued, nudging him in the stomach without looking, “don’t you think you should actually share what’s going on and not blindly throw us into the ring?”

Yakko wordlessly slid the blue shades over his eyes and squished her cheek before sinking into one of the chairs. Sitting on her knees in the chair beside his, Dot leaned in close, her fast-growing bangs giving his cheeks itchy butterfly kisses.

“So? Have we been here before when we were ‘little’? Or at least new to California?” She pressed on, resting her elbows on his thighs.

Wakko appeared on Yakko’s other side, balancing himself against his head and spreading the map out under his nose. “If we had been on Interstate 15,” he said, pointing to the tiny marking, “we really would’ve seen something. I think we passed some preserve or the mountains.”

“I got it; a movie was filmed here. Okay, don’t tell me… _A Night at the Roxbury_. Wait no, that was in Santa Monica.”

“We’re not staying long, are we? It took forever to get here and it’ll take forever going back.”

Dot swiped the blue-tinted sunglasses and squinted through them. “True. If you wanted a vacation so badly, tell us next time.”

“Walmart’s not that far from here.” Wakko shrugged and rolled up the map. “That has nothing to do with anything. I just wanted to point that out.”

Yakko was never a huge fan of tennis, and both voices doing exactly that − going back and forth, back and forth − he could pretend were out of bound. The chatterboxes only rebooted themselves; Wakko plainly asked what they were supposed to do while Dot complained how she wasn’t even dressed for some trip to the bay.

Yakko promptly plucked her flowered scrunchie, yanked off Wakko’s hat, and tossed them away from where he sat. He retrieved his stolen sunglasses and slid them on in time to the pair’s bewildered expressions.

“Fetch,” he commanded.

Though they remained by his side once they’d gotten their respective head pieces, Wakko and Dot didn’t utter so much as a sigh. They maintained their distance on the towels instead of in the chairs, and much like in the car they did their own thing. Wakko poked around the cooler, just seeing what was there and not taking anything, and Dot had somehow swiped the map for herself to read. They weren’t giving Yakko a headache, but they sure weren’t giving him much to work with.

Not exactly how he’d planned things out in his mind, but at least he got a chance to get out of the apartment. He couldn’t wait until it got darker. The marina gave the most spectacular sunsets in San Diego.

“Anything to report?” He decided to ask, halfway out of his thoughts. No feedback. “I’m not talking to myself again, am I?”

Yakko lazily tilted his head to one side, the other, then stared ahead. Wakko had moved to sit by one of the boats, scribbling something in what Yakko guessed was a journal. (If he was doodling on his gloves again, he had better not lick them clean.) He spotted Dot waltzing into view a couple minutes later and figured she’d taken a walk and quickly backtracked when she only saw more boats. He watched her fold over a wooden post, looking bored as ever until something to her left caught her attention.

Or someone.

Yakko expected her to start ogling over some fisherman or a random male passerby, and he knew for sure she’d want to come back in the future. But no, Dot’s eyes were glued to a thin brunette who looked to be of Asian descent. She didn’t strike Yakko as an overly oblivious tourist or another Lucy Liu, but whoever she was had his sister frozen on the spot. He took another guess in thinking the lady was either an old girlfriend or someone she had worked with for the studio.

“Girls,” he teased under his breath.

“What about them?”

Yakko could’ve set a record by how high he jumped out his chair.

“An announcement next time would be great for my heart, thank you. And I was talking about Dot.”

“Oh.” Wakko nodded and splayed himself over Yakko’s lap once he had sat back down. “What about her?”

“Just how she’s possibly making a new friend or reuniting with one.” Pushing him off wasn’t going to work so easily, and he couldn’t bait him by throwing his hat again or a piece of food from the cooler. “Do you mind?”

“No, you can stay.”

At the very least Yakko was spending some close, invading-his-space time with one of his siblings. He let Wakko lounge, fidget, hum, and eventually nap all over his legs as he flipped through the book he’d brought along. Every once in a while he’d lift his head to keep an eye on Dot. She was still talking with the woman, more so with her hands than whatever gibberish his ears caught here and there.

Yakko let her be and went back to reading, occasionally using Wakko’s head as an armrest. He was still napping when Dot eventually joined the three and sat on the towels. Yakko lent her the sunglasses in exchange for her to get him a Cola from the cooler.

“It’s right under your fingers. You get it.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve gained twelve extra pounds.” Yakko nodded down at the motionless Wakko. “We mustn’t disturb thou who slumbers.”

“The sun got to him that fast? We’ve only been here for, like, fifteen minutes.”

“I guess so. It’s not like he was bursting with energy and used it all up when we got here. Or you, for that matter.”

Dot handed over a can and took one out for herself. “Sorry. One second.”

Putting down her soda, she cleared her throat before shrieking out a loud “woo-hoo!” that Yakko was surprised didn’t immediately wake Wakko up. Dot sprung up, running straight for the rocky bayside and doing all sorts of cartwheels and handsprings. She filled the air with carefree giggles, shouting how much she loved Chula Vista and twirling to her echoes bouncing back. She even went so far as to plunge into the bay. Yakko watched with a slightly twitching eye as Dot dragged herself out and plopped down on the towel.

“Like that?” She asked.

Yakko raised a brow and pressed a finger to the bridge of his nose. He was past annoyed and way out of the park of being unamused.

“I’m not gonna say anything,” he chose to say as low and flat as possible.

“What? Nothing after that performance? You’d better. I didn’t dive into that deep, cold water for nothing. Hell, I deserve an Emmy.”

“You deserve soap in your mouth,” Yakko interjected as soon as the word left her mouth.

Dot waved a hand dismissively. “Hell is where you go if you don’t—”

“Listen to your brother and watch your mouth? You hit the nail on the head, sis. Don’t push it.”

“Please, you’ve probably said worse when we’re not around.” Little Miss Fearless took a sip of her soda. “I’m willing to put money that ‘thou who slumbers’ has had his share of naughty words, too.”

“I’ll deal with that if I hear it.”

“If? Not when? Alright then.” Dot took a longer sip and lounged on her brother’s leg. “So, is this like one of those last minute road trips or what?”

Yakko glanced up at the dimming skyline and sighed for as long as his head would shake. “Seriously, am I a broken phonograph that nobody minds?”

“I certainly wouldn’t mind. Do you know how much cash you could get pawning that off?”

“I’m serious.”

“When’d you change your name to—” Dot cut herself off when the scowl that would have been on her for cussing back in the car appeared. “Oh, lighten up. You still po’ed about what I did? It’s not like I was nude or anything. I was kidding around.”

Yakko half scoffed, half laughed. “You were being a jackass. I’ll say that much.”

Dot held up a finger behind a haughty grin. “Ah-ha! So the big brother is allowed to grace our presence with unfiltered profanity, but we prepubescent tykes needn’t bother fowling up our vocabulary with those kinds of words.”

“Not the point. You keep that up, it’ll be a hard habit to break.”

Yakko could have sworn he heard more than just “too late” under Dot’s breath. He turned her around by the arm, leaning over a still snoozing Wakko, and kept her from moving under the fading light.

“Do you even listen when I speak?” He asked her.

“And we’re Back to One. I’m not a fortune teller. I can’t see in a crystal ball what I did wrong or right, so if you have something to tell me…” Dot vaguely waved a hand as she trailed off. “You’re dancing around this with two left feet.”

“And until Astaire rises from his grave to give me proper lessons”—Yakko took back his previously bartered sunglasses—“I guess I’ll keep on dancing.”


	20. When September Ends

“Yakko.”

“Yeah, bro?”

“What did we just do?”

“I don’t know, but whatever it’s supposed to be, it’s giving me splinters just looking at it.”

Wakko sighed and threw himself on the couch, the small tuft of hair dangling from the top of his head jumping as he blew it up in frustration. He picked up the manual and glared at every numbered, bulleted, and foreign instruction. He wasn’t even sure if they’d been given the right material to make a book cubby bin the IKEA catalog promised would “only take 15 easy minutes tops.”

So far he and Yakko had somehow managed to build a park bench, two treasure chests, a poor replica of that leg lamp from _A Christmas Story_ , and just now—something between a propellor and a hockey stick. With lasers.

Yakko crossed his arms at the hunk of wood at his feet. “Let’s take five. Handiwork just isn’t our forte.”

“At least we tried,” Wakko pointed out.

“And we’ll keep trying, because unfortunately we Warners are stubborn like nobody’s business.” Yakko dusted off his gloves after he took apart their latest contraption and headed for the kitchen. “I’m getting a soda. You want one?”

“Make it pineapple.”

“You’re despicable.”

Wakko laughed to himself and glanced back down at the grayed IKEA manual. The longer he reread it, the more it looked like a misfiled mimeograph from Area 51. He guessed he couldn’t complain; he was just glad Yakko was speaking to him and hadn’t found the idea of building something from scratch stupid.

The grand visit to Chula Vista had been anything but grand. Too hot, too boring, and too out of nowhere was more like it. The only thing Wakko had gotten out of the trip was most likely heat exhaustion and something to write about for Scratchansniff.

He still didn’t know what to call the entry or if he would even show it to Scratchy, kind of like how he didn’t know what to make of that one spat in the bathroom about the whole “we’re not technically kids anymore” and how he never told the psychiatrist about Dot’s “open your damn mouth and say it” monologue.

It still stung remembering it all word for word.

More than anything, Wakko wished he’d woken up when Yakko and Dot went at one another. It made him feel guilty, like he was supposed to play mediator and stop them. If he had said something and that hadn’t stopped the bickering, he figured it could have maybe simmered things down and the three could’ve probably enjoyed the smaller parts of San Diego.

Wakko would never know, and Yakko and Dot weren’t speaking to each other. At least, not like they used to.

“What is that thing?”

 _Speak of the little dimpled she-devil._ Wakko looked over to the stairs to see Dot coming down in simple jeans and a T-shirt. She paused at the last step to adjust a red heel, something that made him shake his head.

“It’s either the Lincoln Memorial,” he started answering while also giving a onceover to whatever he had built while lost in thought, “or a really sad-looking birdhouse.”

“Looks more like the Hoover Dam melted to me.”

Wakko shrugged and began taking it apart. “Yakko and I’ve already made hundreds of what it’s not supposed to be. You want in?”

Dot looked from the hand tools littering the carpet, up to the hordes of wood, and into Wakko’s almost desperate eyes before sighing and putting her purse to the side.

“I’ll try my best. If I can wrap my head around what this is even supposed to be,” she added under her breath, brow instantly creasing at whatever she was looking at in the instructions.

“A book cubby.” Yakko backed into the living room, setting down a tray with two sodas and a glass of lemonade. “Wakko’s idea, IKEA’s convoluted planning.”

“Why?”

“Why not? Reading is fundamental.”

“Sure,” Dot mumbled, putting more energy into gripping the papered directions than sounding the least bit interested.

Wakko bit his lip watching her and Yakko in the same room just three feet apart. He was rightfully exhausted after the poor road trip, fluffing up his most recent journal entries, and now he was starring in their first IKEA horror story. He couldn’t afford another argument and crossed his fingers at the rising silence.

Dot looked from one page to the wood and back. “Who was the genius that designed this?”

“I was thinking the same thing about that feathered explosion hanging on the rack,” Yakko jested, eyeing the fabric like it was due to come to life any second.

“There was an explosion in _The Godfather_. Remember that?” Wakko leaned his head in between the two. “We could rent it. Who doesn’t love a good Marlon Brando binge?”

Dot flicked a screw at Yakko’s feet. “Leave my wrap alone. It didn’t do anything to you.”

“And if we don’t get this finished, it won’t be the end of the world. We could all go out and do something else.”

“Wakko, I think I can figure it out by reading. I know what I’m doing.”

“Yeah Wak, let her live a little,” Yakko commented from the couch, sipping his soda. “Because I too use a torque wrench to show a flimsy lag screw who’s boss.”

Dot mimicked his high voice under her breath and snatched the correct tool from his outstretched hand, grumbling even more when he started laughing. Wakko kept watching the two, partly to see if Yakko would say something else smart and because Dot was surrounded by so many screws and sharp items. She claimed to know what she was doing, but she hadn’t seen Wakko sliding tape and screwdrivers away from her tail and feet when she got up to pace after having plopped down out of annoyance.

“Someone give me a hand,” Dot eventually spoke up, struggling to prop up a board. Right on cue, Yakko applauded her with three sharp claps. “Listen here, I have high heels on and small arms.”

Yakko met the sharp scowl with an amused smirk and extended his leg over Dot to push the board in place with his foot. “I’ll never understand why you choose to wear those things,” he said to her.

Dot swatted his ankle. “I like the height, so shove off.”

“And they’re very lovely,” Wakko jumped in with the compliment, then tilted his head. “How come you’re wearing them around the apartment?”

“I was on my way out when you asked me to help.”

“Oh. Do you still need to get going?”

“I’ve got a minute to kill.” But Dot was already strapping her purse over her shoulder and pulling Yakko’s arm out to check his wristwatch. “Maybe not. If you guys are still struggling by the time I get home, I’ll help out again.”

She gave a petty kick to the IKEA manual before heading out the front door, the click of her red heels growing more and more faint down the stairs. Wakko watched her leave the same way he’d watched her stepping around the tools and trying to make something of the loose boards and tape. He jumped back on the couch and scooted close to Yakko, tilting his head to the other side at what Dot had left them to work with.

“What do you think it is?” He asked.

“I’m banking on either the Citadel of Qaitbay or Merv Griffin’s house.” Yakko kept staring at it like it was a dead TV channel, then suddenly repeated under his breath, “If you guys are still struggling by the time I get home.”

Wakko fiddled with the pull tab of his soda can a little too hard and heard it plop into the drink. “So, are we calling it quits?”

“I would much rather have a barbecue.”

Wakko did a double take at the flicks of red and orange jumping at his nose. He didn’t know how fast Yakko had set part of the would-be book cubby on fire or where he found the energy to produce a hot dog on a stick, what with how droopy he had been looking five seconds ago, but he wouldn’t put it past him. He was weird like that. They were all weird like that.

“Well, at least we tried,” Wakko echoed himself from earlier, putting his chin on his knees.

“Look at it this way, sib”—Yakko pulled him closer and offered the now roasted wiener—“we tried something new today, this crazy month is almost over and done with, and we’re putting the worst form of ready-to-assemble product design to good use.”

“I guess.” Wakko honestly forgot that fast how he’d be getting a metal aftertaste if he drank his soda, but he needed something to wash down the taste of pork. “You and Dot still fighting?”

Yakko raised an eyebrow. “When did we start?”

“At that dock place you drove us to. Chula something. We were all by the water, and I was laying on you, and you guys were just…” Wakko made vague motions with his hands, then extinguished the mini bonfire with his soda. “You know?”

Yakko shrugged at the question. “No, I don’t know. That was three days ago.”

“Yeah, I know. You two, I mean recently, it just looked like you…I dunno. You’re snappy and weird around one another now, so if you both are still, well, you say you’re not but you kinda are…”

Wakko bit the inside of his cheek and gazed around the apartment, almost praying for some kind of distraction from two intense things: the heat rising on the side of his neck and Yakko’s staring. He really needed to be careful what he wished for. The magazines and CDs stored under the television stand abruptly began smacking against one another, startling the brothers. The coat rack rocked backwards into the wall, a lampshade shook in place, and papers from the writing desk flopped to the floor.

“Good timing California,” Yakko mumbled under his breath, steadying Wakko by the knee. “Don’t move, don’t move. I don’t think it’s a big one.”

The shaking eased to a calm after a short while, but the pair remained motionless on the couch in case of a nastier aftershock. Nothing else so much as trembled while the two waited for another moment before going around to knock on their neighbors’ doors. Just in case. The complex was full of Californians, so nobody was spooked. They were, however, grateful to have such caring toon tenants like the Warners and each one thanked them for the check up.

Wakko went ahead when they were through and stowed away in the sunroom, chewing his thumb as he paced the cool floor. He had gotten ahead of himself back there. So Yakko and Dot hadn’t been fighting at Chula? Then what did Yakko call what they’d said back and forth to one another? A brotherly/sisterly exchange of words? There had been nothing sibling-friendly about their tones or what they’d been discussing. At least nothing like that that Wakko could remember.

And the stuttering in front of his older brother! Now “open your damn mouth” was starting to make a lot more sense. Wakko’s heart thudded in his chest. Dot had told him that way back when. The earthquake. It hadn’t been a major one, but how far outside had she gotten once it started? Wakko couldn’t remember if she ever said she’d be taking her car or walking, and that stirred up a warmer and unexpected anxiety.

An anxiety that had no reason to pop up. He and Yakko literally just sat through it. Nothing had exploded, the power was still on, and he wasn’t hearing any sirens outside. Still, if he was right and those two really were in a fight, and if they weren’t on good speaking terms, and if something had happened during that earthquake…

Wakko shook his head hard and groped around to his hammerspace until a smooth cylinder jumped into his hand. His steps were faltering under him as he stumbled back into the apartment, using the wall as he felt dangerously unbalanced. Unsafe. Like he was trapped inside a night terror in broad daylight with no one around. He was still thinking about that stupid earthquake, about Dot, about the fight Yakko claimed he and his sister hadn’t ever been in.

His head was hurting too much with so much gunk that didn’t make sense. His brain wasn’t making any sense. Everything had to be fine. Wakko stopped by the stairwell, nearly inhaling more than two that the bottle advised against, and sped towards the hall bathroom for water and privacy. The knob refused to budge, getting his brows to furrow and his impatient hand to jiggle the mess out of it.

“Hey, hey! Occupied!”

Wakko almost choked. “Dot?”

“Yes. Do you mind?”

He spit what was in his mouth into his palm and jammed them in his pocket. His head still felt tight, and he numbly felt his hand trying the knob again.

“I’m almost done, okay? Sheesh.”

“W-what’re you doing back here? When did you get back here? I thought you had somewhere else to be.”

The toilet flushed and the sound of rushing water splashed against the sink a minute too long. Dot finally opened the door, drying off her gloves and giving Wakko a plain look.

“Car wouldn’t start,” she said as if he should’ve known that. “Where I was going wasn’t too important, anyway. Rescheduling is a thing I can do, you know. And I smelled smoke when I came in. What the heck were you and Yakko…”

Wakko didn’t know what else she was saying after “car wouldn’t start.” If that was true or not, he took it without question and enveloped her in a tight hug. She was okay. He could just pretend Yakko had called her after the earthquake, or that a neighbor had distracted her with some gossip before she could hit the boulevard. Or maybe her car really wouldn’t start and she had been protected inside.

“Uh, Wakko? Not that I don’t love hugs, but—”

“I’m just glad…” He caught himself fast and forced a grin. “…you didn’t wear those shoes with that purse. A horrible decision, really. Oh, and Yakko burned the cubby. Or what it was supposed to be. It wasn’t worth the stress.”

Dot looked ready to say something but decided against it, instead offering a half-hearted pat to the arm and heading upstairs. Much like before, Wakko watched her leave and breathed a loud sigh of relief once he heard a door close. He felt around in his pocket and took out the spit-and-lint covered tablets. For a hot second, he thought about flushing them down the toilet, but he also thought how there would be two less things to help him along when he would seriously need them next time.

So he stored them back in the bottle, because he never knew when he would need them for something bigger than whatever other mess could happen after the month.


	21. Breath in December

**December 21, 2001**

The cake was nothing special. Just a lemon thyme circle with alternating layers of vanilla and buttercream. It had no real theme to it and wasn’t exciting to look at, but it was fresh on the plate and Yakko was okay with it. He snuck another look over the counter, seeing the same thing he’d seen in the last twenty seconds he checked.

Wakko lay still as a brick on the couch, the only movement being the rise and fall of his chest. Yakko could tell he hadn’t moved in his sleep once, and the way his arms were folded under him and how one leg was bent on the cushion couldn’t be all that comfortable. He set the cake aside and made a beeline for the linen closet, fishing out a sheet, two pillows, and a spare blanket. There was no reaction to the makeshift bed being made under him, but Yakko still held his breath and tried to move his brother as little as possible.

 _Guess I’ll let the little goober wake up on his own_ , he decided, taking off Wakko’s hat and stretching him out.

It was hard to imagine this was Wakko Warner. _The_ Wakko Warner that tore around Burbank from sun up to sun down back in the nineties. The very zany “eleven year old” that had an eight year streak of terrorizing celebrities with his siblings, giving his p-psychiatrist gray nose hairs, and handing Stephen Hawking another black hole theory to consider, since his stomach was declared one by many.

In sleep he was harmless, not one to yip and snore like how the show had made him do for comedic effect. Yakko didn’t fight the impulse to crack a smile and plant a quick kiss on top of Wakko’s head. He returned to the kitchen with really nothing else to do but either pace the floor or sit and stare at the cake. He chose the latter and strapped himself down for another ride on his carousel of thoughts.

Another New Year was just around the corner in eleven easy steps. Another Christmas was going to be caroling into their apartment faster than four calling birds. Like every late December, Yakko had to wonder what the next day would offer him and his sibs.

Today marked two years since _Animaniacs_ went silently into the night, but even now Yakko refused to connote their final appearance on television with December alone. Yes, Ruegger had babied them about being let go five days after _Wakko’s Wish_ went on VHS, and yes it had been decided that the musical comedy would be the last official appearance of the Warners, and yes if Yakko channel surfed on the right network at two in the morning, he could catch one of their seven Christmas-themed segments or commercials and get the same bittersweet taste in his mouth.

He put one leg over the other to stop it from shaking. He really didn’t want to make December all about their career coming to an end when it’d been going so well. Gone were the halcyon days for the animation world and sprightly toons bursting off the screen, and it was kind of unsettling how much Yakko was aware of this and how he actually had the free time to wax nostalgia as much as he could talk.

But, _third time’s a charm_ , he did not want to think that that was all there was to December. It was a start to something new as well as an end to something memorable, right? Yakko groaned and slammed his head on the table.

_I want off this ride._

“…no way it can be done. That’s the part he doesn’t get!”

Yakko found Dot’s phone conversation unintentionally alluding to his inner thoughts quite disturbing, but then it hit him that one, she wasn’t talking to him, and two, she was home. He rushed over to the counter and waved his hands. She waved back with a smile, but then she followed the wild gestures over to the couch and gave a start.

“I’ll call you back, hun,” she said quietly into her phone. She tiptoed past Wakko and set some bags on the kitchen table as Yakko closed the shutters. “How was I supposed to know he was asleep on the couch?”

“Forget it. We could play an accordion in his face and he wouldn’t budge. You got the stuff?”

“Yes, Escobar.” Dot grabbed Yakko’s wrist and put his finger in the center of a parcel she was beginning to tie with a ribbon. “I also need you to know I had to go to six different stores in three different counties on one broken heel for this.”

He whistled low. “I’m sure Wakko will appreciate the sacrifice.”

“He better. You wouldn’t believe how many people were doing this last minute holiday shopping. Honestly. You’d think the world was coming to an end! Barely a thing on the shelves, some people were actually scuffling and bribing one another for this and that…”

“Lots of foul language and biting, I presume?” Yakko added with a lazy smirk.

“How do you think I got this broken heel?”

Yakko hummed under his breath as Dot finished up with the bow and began wrapping a different one around his wrist just because. He watched her take out a marker and sign the colorful packaging paper, then stash it inside a lone bag before taking out red and green decor for the kitchen.

“Dot, let me ask you something. I just had a thought—”

“Uh oh,” she laughed over her shoulder.

“I know. I’ll keep it brief. Now be honest. You think I’m doing okay?”

“How’s that?”

“Going so-so.” Yakko slouched in the chair, crossing his legs at the ankle. “I’m just putting this out in the air when it’s still early to catch it. How do you think I’m doing so far dealing with you guys? Am I doing a bang-up job?”

Dot regarded him over her shoulder again with a raised brow. “You sure you don’t want to ask me and Wakko this together? Sounds like something you’d ask in a family meeting or something.”

“He’s not the one with a screen test and post-film press conferences each month.” Yakko smirked a little at her protests under her breath. “Hey, I could ask him this any time of the day. You, my dear, I’d need to go through your agent, five receptionists, an intern, and Alan F. Horn, and I still wouldn’t get an appointment until five years later.”

Dot eventually rejoined him at the table, draping the cloth with star-shaped silver tinsel and tilting her head.

“You want an evaluation? Alright.” She cleared her throat and began listing off her fingers. “You never let me drive to the studio by myself, if I wear so much as lip gloss you have a panic attack, you snore, and you’re always poking fun at my clothes.”

Yakko had three wisecracks at the ready, but Dot stuffed the sparkling material in his mouth.

“You made me switch to decaf,” she went on. “I always have to check in if I’m more than an hour from Burbank, and I know Wakko covered up for you when you hid my pager last week. So…I’d say you’re about a 4.5.”

Yakko coughed the decoration out. “Out of?”

“Seven.”

“Sheesh. I gotta talk to the professor about extra credit.”

“Mm-hm. Now it’s my turn to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

Dot pointed to the cake. “What the hell is that?”

Yakko let the remark slide but didn’t answer right away. He slid it over, almost defensively, as Dot stood on her toes and squinted at its frosted sides from every angle possible, looking more confused by the second.

“We need a new one,” she declared.

Yakko crossed his arms. “That we do not. I made it myself.”

“I can tell. You put too much lemon in this.”

“Did not.”

“Yakko, Madeline Fogg’s dress is the only thing that should be this yellow.” Dot hesitantly picked up the plate, giving it another onceover. “You really think Wakko will eat all of this? It’s kinda big.”

“Oh, don’t exaggerate. It’s about the size of your foot. No wait,” Yakko suddenly mused, running a finger under his chin, “I should say it’s the exact size of your head. I did use the bread pan, after all.”

Dot pointed in warning at his rising smirk and cocked eyebrow.

“There’s a bakery fifteen minutes from here. We’re getting another cake even if I have to shove the entire thing in my mouth.”

Yakko rolled his eyes. “You do that and give no reaction to how lemon saturated you claim this is, and I will personally drive you to the nearest Jimmy Choo on the west coast and buy whatever you want.”

“And Cartier?”

“Stop leaving your makeup all over the bathroom counter and then we’ll talk.”

Yakko didn’t think she would do it. Scratch that, he knew she wouldn’t do it. His surprise did a complete 180 as he watched his sister stick her tongue out at the hunk of lemon thyme, spare a glance over at the trash can, and then ever so slowly slide the dessert in her mouth. He swore he heard the sound of glass shattering in time to how dilated her eyes got and caught his burst of laughter a second too late.

Dot looked like a stunned chipmunk on the verge of a mental breakdown. No reaction was a part of the deal, but her wide eyes were larger than Yakko’s confidence to be laughing at her in the first place.

“Let’s see now. Maybe you could have gotten…Tiffany’s,” he teased, lightly pinching Dot’s cheek. “Cartier. Black Starr. Frost Gorham. Talk to me Harry Winston, tell me all about it.”

Around the cake, Dot either said she knew where he slept or that she was going to snap a neck. Yakko wished he had a camera somewhere in the kitchen drawers, but he took a suddenly awake Wakko dragging his feet into the kitchen without complaint. He rubbed one eye and stopped mid-yawn, staring hard at the two at the table.

“Uh…”

“She ate the cake I made, just for you, with my blood, sweat, and tears,” Yakko explained.

Dot glared up at him and beat a fist on her chest, hissing under her breath. “I saved your life, Wakko. That’s what I did.”

Yakko’s amusement immediately shot up to astonishment as he did a double take. “Did… No way did you really just… The _entire_ thing?”

“You don’t mess with a girl and her shoes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Wakko looked from one crazy sibling to the other, unable to make sense of what he’d missed, and took a cautionary step back.

“I think I’d like answers. What about shoes? What was in Dot’s mouth? What’s with all the bags on the table?”

“One of those answers I can physically show you right about now. That second one?” Yakko shook his head and led Wakko back to the living room. “I don’t think you want to see its end result.”

“Boys…” Dot muttered as she grabbed one of the bags and followed them.

Yakko sat on the couch on Wakko’s right while Dot took the left, both simultaneously scooting close to sandwich him in. Again, Wakko looked from one sibling to the other and leaned back, lightly gripping the cushions.

“What?” He asked slowly. “Is something gonna jump out?”

“No,” Dot sang out, batting her lashes.

“I don’t trust you. Yakko, is something going… Wait, I don’t trust you, either.” Wakko started fiddling behind him for whatever came first out of his hammerspace. “I’m trusting myself and saying something’s going to jump out.”

Yakko chuckled and patted his shoulder. “Relax, little bro. We wouldn’t do that to you on this special day.”

“Why is today any different?”

“Maybe this”—Dot held out the flower-print bag with a satisfied grin—“will shed some light on that memory shack of yours.”

Wakko carefully took it and rummaged past the blue tissue paper, tongue poking out in caution at first and then pure curiosity to see what was inside. He fished out the parcel, eyeing Dot’s frilly signature for a nanosecond before ripping off the paper and bow in one yank − much to Yakko’s returning amusement and Dot’s disbelief. When Wakko turned the gift right-side up, it was like a rolodex of emotions flipped through his face. Shock, awe, elation, nostalgia.

“No way!” He hugged the VHS tightly to his chest. “How did you get this?”

“Details aren’t important,” Dot brushed off after catching Yakko’s questioning stare. “Happy two-year anniversary, movie star!”

“You must be one proud papa,” Yakko teased, ruffling Wakko’s hatless hair.

“I am. I really am.” Wakko beamed down at the three of them balancing on a sled, surrounded by the bright snow. “Wow… Two years. We made this _two_ years ago, you guys. Isn’t that faboo?”

Yakko laughed as he brought him in for a hug. His inner toon was showing and he was completely over the moon with the four, hard-to-come-across square corners of his pride and joy.

“Yeah kiddo, really faboo.”

Dot, who neither had even noticed leave, returned to the couch with two wrapped oatmeal cookies and a package of old Halloween candy.

“It’s no acidic heartburn with two layers, but these should do. I’ll make us something in a little bit.”

Wakko took one of the cookies and held the tape up. “Can we watch this now?”

“Why not?” Yakko took the middle seat as Wakko set up the VCR and Dot got comfy on his left. “I’m always down seeing Dottie ham it up for the camera.”

Dot let out a single _ha!_ and crossed her legs. “I’m sorry, what was that? Who was nominated for an Annie Award?”

“The Great Stonini,” Wakko stated matter-of-factly, jumping back on the couch. “I miss him. This was his greatest work ever. I’m glad we got to work with him.”

Dot reached over to squeeze his hand. “I’m glad I could find this for you.”

Yakko brought the two of them in close as the beginning credits rolled in. “I’m glad we can all still be together like this.”


	22. Spring Fever

**March 2002**

If Dot wanted to look and feel her worst, she picked a good month. During the lull between winter and spring, the weather in Burbank wasn’t too bad and the skies were mostly clear where she could easily step outside to catch some sunlight. Unfortunately, allergies and colds spread according to weather conditions and not their seasonal dates on the calendar.

Dot jerked up from her place in bed, the inside of her nose tingling, and blindly reached for the Kleenex on the nightstand. Her fingers brushed against her Bette Davis figurine and alarm clock, knocking both to the carpet. She jumped when she heard them collide on the way down and her throat suddenly squeezed out the most painfully rugged cough in history. Her nose promptly shriveled at the noise. No sneeze, no fresh air, not even a thing of snot.

She ground her teeth together and sank under the covers, trying to find that one cool spot on her sheets where she hadn’t been lying on. The small of her back ached no matter which way she turned and her eyes watered more than a broken-hearted teenager on a chick flick binge.

A knock on the door startled away an incoming sneeze, followed by Yakko’s voice asking, “Everything okay in there?”

“My stomach’s in my throat.”

“Long as you keep it inside your body, you’ll be fine.” Yakko stepped inside and handed over a new packet of tissues. “Sheesh, you do not look pretty.”

“I look and feel like Death. Were you expecting Stephanie Baldwin under the sheets?”

Even through her watery glare, Dot could see the suggestive smirk on Yakko’s face and hear him go “ooh” under his breath as he tapped his chin in thought. She smacked him with her pillow, triggering a put away sneeze to whiplash out in the most unenjoyable way. She pressed her hands over her nose and turned away, feeling another shoot out.

She thought she had asked for a thing of snot, not an entire legion.

“Wow. That deserved its own caption in the air.” Yakko offered a handful of Kleenex and sat at a reasonable distance on the bed.

“You think if I called Dean saying I basically threw up Kansas he won’t badger me to come in today?” Dot asked as she blew her nose.

“Sis, if that guy gives you any grief for not showing up when you feel this bad, I’ll put a badger down his pants.”

The sound Dot’s nose made was indescribably gross when she snorted out a laugh, but she needed a little distraction. She blew into the tissue again and tossed it in her waste bin.

“This feels too real,” she moaned, covering her eyes with her arms.

“A price we toons must pay. You’ll be alright,” Yakko assured her, smoothing her hair aside. “I hear these things only last two weeks, three weeks top, every year for the rest of your natural born life.”

Dot peeked up at him, shaking from another laugh building up and another crude cough. She kicked him when the two blended in a horrible mix.

“Don’t make me laugh.” Their deadpanned expressions lasted for half a second before they sputtered out in giggles. “ _Don’t_. Everything hurts.”

“They say laughter is the best medicine. I think you’re overdue for some.” Yakko brushed aside more of her hair. “Anything I can get you, o’ weak and frail one?”

“Solitude.” Dot pulled the covers up to her chin. Her good mood was tanking at the woozy feeling returning to her head after their laughs. “At least for now.”

“As you wish.”

Yakko’s lips pecked her lukewarm forehead and he left her alone in her hypersensitivity ward. Fifteen seconds later and Dot already wanted him back. Yakko could be as annoying, boyish, or blabber-mouthed as he wanted to be; he was still company. She even considered calling out to Wakko, but she could only take so much of his convoluted humor before wanting to stick her head in the microwave. Plus, she had no idea if they would catch whatever she had. It didn’t feel like hay fever, but she couldn’t say for sure she had caught a cold. She glanced down at her clock still on the floor − 7:27 a.m., it said − and groaned.

“I couldn’t have felt this bad at two in the afternoon instead?” Dot asked the ceiling. It blurred in response. “I hate you.”

She popped another throat lozenge in her mouth and crossed her arms, burning holes in the white lace testers of her canopy bed. She slowly felt around her other nightstand for something to look at and wound up rereading the same catalogs of _Bazaar_ a good eleven times before Farrah Fawcett’s interview sounded awfully familiar.

With a stuffy long sigh, Dot pushed herself up and reached for her bathrobe draped over the footboard, deciding at the last second to leave it open. She stored the Kleenex in its pockets, hugged her pillow to her chest, and eased her way downstairs to plop on the unoccupied couch. She blissfully sank into the refreshingly cold cushions and closed her eyes in total rapture, almost forgetting about the cold/allergies/whatever crap was sickening her. Almost.

_I probably should’ve grabbed the remote first._

“Yakko, are you down here?”

“No, but the other brother is.”

Dot’s ears followed Wakko’s voice coming out of the closed-off den. “Come here a minute, will you? And pass me the remote.”

Wakko entered the living room with a book tucked under his arm and glanced down at the tiny device on the coffee table. He looked from Dot to the remote and back, then out of nowhere he whisked out a thing of measuring tape from his hat and made her hold the metal bit as he stretched the yellow seal out.

“Mm-hm, yep, okay. I’d say it’s about…six inches and three centimeters away from you,” he declared. “Get it yourself.”

Dot let go so the metal would snap his fingers. “Just hand it to me. I already don’t feel good.” She hugged her pillow again, only showing her right-on-time watering eyes. “Pretty please?”

Wakko shook his head but obediently handed the remote over with no further questions. Dot chuckled in sweet victory under her breath as she turned on their bulky TV set and flipped through reruns of everything from _7th Heaven_ to _Reba_ to her beloved _Charmed_. She was surprised to catch a snippet of _Rocky and Bullwinkle_ going on strong so early in the morning, but she couldn’t concentrate on a single channel. Wakko had sat down on the furthest part of the couch at some point and was doing a poor pantomime of skimming through his book.

“1501 North Victory Place,” Dot told him.

Wakko looked up with a start. “Huh?”

“That’s where the closest Best Buy is. They sell cameras there. I figured you wanted one by how long you’ve been staring at me.”

“Oh, no. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Eight and a half clicks later and Dot had to settle for an episode of _Law & Order_ she’d already seen. “You’re still staring.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Oh no? Read back to me what you just read.”

Wakko mumbled under his breath but did eventually comply with a hastily rushed, “‘Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef. What is that handle made of?’”

Dot snatched the large book from his hands and scanned through it. “Tell me,” she started in exasperation with a curved brow, “where in this photo album are you seen monologuing _Moby Dick_?”

Wakko snatched it back and closed it over his chest. “Page 17. My nose may have been stuck in that Pringles can, but my mind was thinking beyond.”

“Yeah, ‘what but the barbecue of the stackable chips of the very can you are eating’? And I wouldn’t sit so close. I don’t know what I have.”

“The remote.”

If Dot were as gross as she was feeling, she would’ve thrown a DNA-covered tissue at his face. She kept her nose covered with her millionth one and nodded her clouded head toward the kitchen.

“Since we’re making conversation, we can keep it up. Go get me something in there.”

Wakko didn’t protest or make any pointless gags, something Dot found oddly satisfying and out of place. She paid it no mind and returned to Jerry Orbach and Steven Hill, every once in a while needing to switch from lying on her stomach to sprawled out on her back. She wriggled out of her bathrobe and stripped off the pillow case to press on top of her head, barely finding its tepid temperature better than the hot spell she had cast on the couch. Her eyes shut for a moment when something hard lightly bonked her on the forehead. Movement was just a given for the main cause of her sneezes; Dot bent over, offering two inside her shirt, and turned to glare.

“Here.” Wakko was holding their unplugged blender. 

“What is that?”

“What you wanted.”

“I asked you to get me something from the kitchen.”

“I sure didn’t pull this out of the toilet.”

“Wakko…” Dot pinched the bridge of her nose that was clogging back up. “I’m going to _shove_ you down the toilet. I meant something to chew on.”

He simply shrugged and stuck out his tongue. “Should’ve been more specific.”

The extension cord on the appliance was looking more and more useful, but Dot forced her eyes away and pointed over the counter again.

“Could you just get me something that’s edible before I hold you down and cough on you?”

“My own sister? With the same ink and blood as me? Coughing in my face?” Wakko clicked his tongue in wonder. “I think I’m really doomed.”

The blender was too heavy and pricey to throw, so Dot grabbed the next best thing − the photo album − and smacked him in the cheek with it. She didn’t know why he looked so shocked afterwards; he started it, so she was finishing it. But the unamused frown and his slowly placing the blender on the coffee table got her heart suddenly racing.

“You brought it on yourself,” Dot pointed out, her voice hoarse from a dry throat and slight apprehension. “Don’t get mad at me, you−!”

She tumbled off the couch when Wakko made a grab at her, looking and feeling like a newborn deer learning to walk as she went ring-around-the-rosie beside every end table, sitting furniture, and the writing desk before racing upstairs.

“Yakko!”

She caught sight of a leg leaving the bathroom and clung onto it. Yakko yelped in alarm, flailing his arms and catching himself on the wall. Wakko came barreling into view seconds later, and Dot less than gracefully clamored further up her brother’s thigh.

“Time! Time!” Yakko called out, wildly gesturing for a timeout.

“7:47 a.m., Pacific Standard Time. But that’s not important right now.” Wakko glared and pointed. “She hit me for no reason.”

Dot’s jaw dropped. “You liar! You tested my very last nerve and started chasing me for no reason!”

“You were being lazy just for attention!”

“That doesn’t even make any sense!”

“Context is not complex,” Yakko butted in. He waved a hand for Wakko to take a step back so he could shake Dot off his leg. “Okay, let’s get the basics out the way first. Dot, why were you in the living room? I thought you wanted to be left alone.”

“I did,” she admitted, crossing her arms at Wakko’s bitter expression. “At first. I wasn’t going to sulk in my room all day. I needed to get up and walk around eventually. Food and entertainment are pretty important, too.”

“That I can get behind. So you had to hit Wakko to complete that?”

Dot rolled her eyes. “I didn’t even hit him that hard.”

“ _This_ ”—Wakko pointed at a stamp-sized blotch under his eye—“is the work of a she-hulk.”

Yakko whistled low and carefully took his chin for inspection, then pricked up a displeased brow. “Will we be explaining ourselves, Dot?”

Her heart oddly revved up in the corner of her chest at both of her brothers’ stares, each one unhappy for two different reasons. She crossed her arms tighter and held back another eye roll, instead putting in the energy to ignore the nasty cough rising in her throat.

“I ask him to do one simple thing for me,” she muttered, “and he has to turn it into some stretched out joke. You can’t blame me for wanting to hit him.”

Wakko crossed his arms, too. “What happened to laughter is the best medicine?”

Dot’s face clicked from surprise to confusion to shock to anger all in a span of seven seconds.

“You little sneak! Were you spying on me and Yakko?”

Wakko blinked in confusion. “How do I spy in our own house?”

“I don’t care how you do it. _Don’t_. That’s just weird and creepy. And outside my bedroom, too!”

Yakko stepped in between them and held them away from each other at arm’s length. “Please, one sub-category of violence at a time.”

“You sure were energetic downstairs for someone not feeling so good,” Wakko went on with a tilted head.

“You think it was fun running away from you like that? My lungs are still on fire.” Dot clenched a fist that immediately unraveled to cover the earlier cough. “And everything on you is fixin’ to hurt, too, if you keep it up. I am not in the mood.”

“Sibs, can we just—”

“When are you ever in the mood, you workaholic?”

“Shut up!”

“Make me!”

The palm to Yakko’s forehead and tapping fingers on his temple practically spelled out that he wasn’t going to try and get a word in anymore. He turned Dot in the direction of her room and Wakko towards the path of their bathroom.

“Here’s an idea − let’s all just step away from this heat of the moment fiasco and simmer down. Agreed? Good,” he cut in before either sibling could open their mouths. “We’ll get you back to your handsome self in no time, Wakko. And you, little missy, just get back to bed and rest.”

From the corner of her eye, Dot caught Wakko blowing a silent raspberry her way. She blew up her bangs at the childish behavior and went to tie the strings of her bathrobe when she remembered she’d left it downstairs. She retrieved it with no lip from Wakko on the way down and shot him a look once she returned, blowing her nose as loud as possible in his general direction. She dared him to say or do something in her mind, but Yakko had already walked him into the bathroom.

That was perfectly fine, and Dot slammed her bedroom door shut to express just how perfectly fine it really was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow. This marks the start of the series’ first of many New Years. I can tell this’ll be one long story of mine, if not the longest, but it’ll be worth it. Thank you so very much to those of you who’ve given this story a chance 💕 
> 
> An extra special biased thank-you to [septiceyesweetheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/septiceyesweetheart/pseuds/septiceyesweetheart). Anytime I see you update your [Animaniacs story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27262084/chapters/66602170), I get excited all over again, and anytime I see you leave a thoughtful comment, the biggest smile gets on my face. And a very special thank-you to ALL of those lovely readers who have left behind kudos and the sweetest comments a girl could ever hope for. They’re my bread and butter. They really motivate me and let me know I’m on the right track, so please don’t be shy and let me know your thoughts :)
> 
> I hope I can continue to make you all laugh, smile, and possibly emotional, because from here on out, there will be lots more drama and scattered fluff.


	23. Sunday Mundane

Aspirin bounced off Wakko’s headache like it was in a full suit of armor. He blinked a couple times and focused on an empty space in his dark room between the wardrobe and door, finding it more entertaining to force a cough out of his throat than count how many polaroids from the Nineties outdid the grainy photographs from the Sixties on the walls.

His hands kept going up to touch or scratch around his face, and there was a fluttering in his stomach he wasn’t so sure was related to an incoming low blood sugar fit or something he ate. The only sore feeling he could actually put a cause to was the bruise on his cheek. He rubbed it with his thumb, feeling the sticky white coverup he’d snuck from Dot’s room days ago and a faint throbbing as the blemish spread to the size of a quarter.

Wakko winced when he poked a tender spot and rolled onto his stomach, placing his chin in the middle of his pillow. His temper was grating on time the longer his eyes stayed open and the more he thought about how a simple game night shouldn’t have spelled trouble like it had an hour ago.

The Warners had already been impatient at the slowness of March and had come to an agreement that they could do something to speed things up. There had been a certain pattern during Scrabble; Wakko would put down a word, Dot was quick to jump in and say there was no such thing, and Yakko would break out the dictionary. Wakko had been fine with being the one closely looked at and had laughed along with them, admitting there were some words he never got right. But once he took the chance to spell out a suddenly-remembered “exigency,” Dot had done more than denounce its existence.

_“I don’t even know what that’s supposed to be. You have to play the game right.”_

_“I am playing it right. It’s a word.”_

_“No, it’s not. You’ve been doing this all night, so knock it off.”_

_“You’ve been minding my points more than yours, so you knock it off.”_

Wakko buried his head into his pillow, repeatedly swallowing and feeling his body shake even though he wasn’t cold. It was so difficult to concentrate on other distracting thoughts because of how un-Yakko Yakko had been throughout the squabble.

_“Use more anger in your voice.”_

_“Like, I get not knowing how to spell, believe me. But all of this mushing together verbs and abbreviations?”_

_“Less panicky.”_

_“We’re trying to get points here, and if these are actual words in the English language, then I can understand Ozzy Osbourne.”_

_“Good girl.”_

The back of Wakko’s neck bristled the more he was bothered by these thoughts. He knew Yakko had been kidding around and telling him to knock it off further made him the butt of the joke, but it hurt. It was like he’d ganged up on him for no reason. His own brother! Wakko’s hands and feet squirmed under the blanket, hearing in his head Yakko say to himself how the whole thing was “Oscar worthy” while Dot continued to verbally downsize him.

_“I’m telling you it’s a word. What part don’t you get?”_

_“Look, just take it off the board or forfeit your turn.”_

_“Why do I have to give up a turn just because you want to win so bad? Do you have to say every word I use is fake?”_

_“Oh god. Yakko, can you please just check again before he explodes? He’s legitimately pissing me off.”_

_“I’m pissing you off? You’re the one acting like I’m too dumb to spell!”_

Whoever was coming upstairs softly drowned out the sounds of the Scrabble board hitting the kitchen floor in Wakko’s mind. His heart beat fast and he curled tighter into himself, making sure his eyes were covered by the pillowcase. One ear lifted at the sound of his door opening, but he couldn’t tell whose footsteps were coming in. His cap was taken off, and a pair of eyes glowing in the dark stared him down easily for two minutes. He still couldn’t tell if it was Yakko or Dot, but whichever one it was left as soon as he moved.

Wakko’s forehead wrinkled in the middle. He was unable to fall asleep but too lazy to get up and find something to occupy himself with. His room was the least fit for self-entertainment and only had the standard bed/wardrobe/window set. No bookcase, no radio, no TV. He liked it simple and always figured a bedroom didn’t need all of that extra junk if you were only going to be sleeping there.

Well, he did have one book. A big black book with a crooked stripe across the center hidden under the mattress, but he debated heavily if it was worth opening. It wasn’t so late, but he needed to get some rest sooner or later. If he went to bed right away without calming down, though, he was sure to have a bad dream or a worse stomachache in the morning.

Wakko’s tongue pushed into his cheek as he switched from his sides to his back, again and again, trying to relax. His flashbulb pulse wouldn’t quit unless he sat up or moved around, and with a snort he thought it kind of funny how it seemed that his body was using itself as an excuse to stay up a little longer _for that stupid book_.

“Nothin’ to lose,” he muttered to no one, and slid out of bed to find the stashed away object.

Wakko then snuck downstairs into the shut-off den, turning on a smaller lamp and sitting in the large and only chair of the room. The book opened with a satisfying crack, giving off a glue and powdery smell. All the paper was soft to the touch, and he now realized he didn’t need to bash so hard on the handwriting anymore. It was bubbly and small, but legible. Sometimes it mixed cursive and print.

Wakko made his eyes go through it all, starting at page one. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. If he fumbled with a word in his head, he brought the book closer and started the sentence over. If his chest tightened or his fingers seized up, he marked his place and counted backwards from 100. He stopped at 42, both in his counting and the number of pages he had fully looked over.

42 entries. He didn’t feel so cold anymore and knew his focus wasn’t going anywhere for some time now. He checked the wall clock in the kitchen out of curiosity and saw it was 3:23 a.m. It was officially Sunday morning.

_Yikes._

If he didn’t give that focus a rest right now, he would be up all night and most likely having to explain himself. Wakko returned to the den for the book, hugging it nice and tight to his chest as he leaned against the wall. He found it both relieving and off-putting how silent his thoughts finally were and how the game incident was slowly becoming more of a tolerable blurb than a fiery hot topic of the night.

It had been a pretty stupid fight, but his feelings during it, he determined, were not stupid. He was still holding on to how sensitive and unhappy he had felt, and he knew sooner or later it would just be another entry he could reflect on if he ever felt worse. And he would feel worse.

 _But that’s okay_ , Wakko thought with a small smile that dropped the second someone entered the den. _I hope._

“What are you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep. You?”

Dot nodded. “Same thing.”

Wakko fit his book into his hammerspace and guided her to the kitchen after turning off the lamp. He flipped the light switch up with his tail and made a beeline for the cabinet, taking out two glasses.

“Is it the allergies?” He asked over his shoulder as Dot took their juice pitcher from the fridge.

“Allergies, a cold, someone’s vendetta catching up with me…” She shrugged, sounding more congested than she had four hours ago. “Either way, it sucks.”

“At least you’ll smell like Vicks Vaporub and cherries.”

Wakko set the now filled glasses on the table and went straight to work washing some leftover dishes crowding the sink. It was really only three forks and a plate, but it was giving him a reason to stick around longer. (And to not have a mountain of things to wash on his day to clean.)

“You’re hungry, too?” He asked when he heard the hum of the frigidaire again.

“Just in the mood for something sweet. Nothing big.” The big pink bakery box Dot pulled from the shelf begged to differ. She gave him a guilty shrug and pointed to the table. “I, uh…I had an _exigency_ for cheesecake.”

Wakko laughed and dried off the last two forks to put on the table. “Told ya it was a word.”

“Yeah, yeah. I went through four dictionaries and a thesaurus to finally find it. Happy?”

“Elated. I earned those twenty-one points fair and square.”

Dot shook her head, cut a thin slice for each of them, and jokingly mumbled, “I still would’ve won.”

“Because you’re a nerd,” Wakko coughed into his fist. “ _Ahem_. I think whatever you have is spreading. Stay away from me.”

Dot flicked a thing of frosting off her fork towards his face, which was easily deflected by his tongue. She mumbled something about him but said it with a smile. Wakko sat down with a smile of his own, pulling his plate close and giving the quiet a chance to settle for a minute before nudging Dot’s foot under the table.

“You know you’re a pain, right?” He asked her.

“Very much so, yes.”

“And you drive me crazy every single day.”

Dot blew him a kiss. “Part of my charm, darling.”

“And…”

Wakko ducked his head when the words didn’t immediately fall out. He splayed his fingers over the tablecloth, clinking the fork on the edge of the plate and chewing on his tongue to get it working again. When he glanced up, Dot was staring. Probably had been for a while, and that made him a little bit braver to start over.

“You’re a pain, and you drive me crazy every single day, and if I ever go off the rails, or say something weird, or do something that makes you wanna hit me…it’s okay.”

Dot lowered her gaze for a second at the last part mentioned but otherwise kept staring, this time with narrowed eyes and a tilted head.

“It’s okay,” Wakko repeated, quietly this time. “I’m working through things. Forty-two of them, I guess. But it’s good that I can think about them now and not get so upset. S-sorry. I know this isn’t making any sense, but…I love you. Okay?”

Dot held still for another moment, glanced down at her plate, and spun her fork through the cheesecake before nodding.

“I love you, too,” she finally said.


	24. Something’s Got To Give

A crescent moon hung behind the folds of the pink clouds, leaving a big enough gap for a pale stripe in the sky. The humpback shapes of the water moved in pairs under the rising sunlight and took on a champagne color along with the existing blue. Yakko rested his arms on the balcony rail, eyes locked on the ripples that seemed to be breathing right below him.

It had been a challenge being as quiet as possible so early in the morning and a complete maze having to walk blind through the apartment building. He’d stuck out like a leg in a cast for being the only Californian able to smile past six o’clock, but his efforts had been worth it. It was no Chula Vista sunrise on the marina, but the neighbor’s kiddie pool could deliver a nice reflection.

Yakko spotted a tip of the moon in the water and felt his mouth perk up. If Wakko could find his unmute button and when Dot was no longer under the weather, he wouldn’t mind bringing them up to watch the sun dip and the moon rise. Or vice versa. Not right away, but it was just something for the future. That is, if they were all ever in a good mood and not at each other’s throats. Getting together wasn’t mandatory, but it was still a nice gesture of brother/brother/sister time. They were in a good neighborhood, so why not take advantage of it?

Yakko groaned and marched himself back inside. The heat was getting to him.

 _Too early to be indecisive and sibling sappy_ , he thought. He checked up on Wakko just as he was thinking this and smiled. _Never expected him to be an early bird back then, so I shouldn’t expect it now._

He snorted at one of his many odd sleeping positions—something between a starfish and like he was bursting through a rock wall—and only moved him to the middle of the bed so he wouldn’t topple over. When he went to check on Dot, he saw she was burrowed under the covers that was most likely self-torture and not snuggling up to keep warm. A whole CVS cluttered her bedside table and one armless sleeve hung limp off the side of the bed.

Yakko offered it a single pat and left for the kitchen, already feeling a buzz of his own for the hot toddy she’d be wanting later on. Whatever Dot had caught earlier in the month didn’t seem to be getting worse, but Yakko didn’t want to count his chickens. He hadn’t heard her complaining out loud lately, but he also hadn’t seen any signs that she was feeling better. Twice he’d caught her swaying on her feet, but she waved it off saying it was how she always stood. The medicine cabinet was her best friend, and no spells or anxiety-inducing fits had called for the worse case scenario.

But the only little girl in Burbank, who always ranted and raved to her brothers about them needing to watch their health and eat well and get their eight hours, did not like doctors. Scratchansniff was the one and only exception in her book, but a very slim exception.

Yakko’s ears suddenly picked up the front door lock jiggling just as he was setting a full mug down to cool. He did a double take at the very little girl he had been thinking about slipping inside, pointlessly sneaking on the tips of her toes when their floor was carpeted. Dot coughed into her elbow as she tossed a red peacoat into the closet, oblivious to who was watching and staying that way until she turned around.

“You’re up pretty early,” Yakko pointed out with a raised brow.

“I needed some fresh air for…” She gestured around her puffy eyes and the rosy bridge of her nose. “This.”

“Fresh air with your purse, heels, car keys, and coat?”

Dot looked to the stairs, over to the kitchen, and back, then nodded firmly. “Yeah.”

Yakko leaned over the counter, watching her clumsily recollect herself and head for the stairs. He squinted at a paperback too wide to be hidden under her arm, but she sure was trying her hardest to not be seen with it.

“Freeze. What is that?”

“What?”

Yakko stepped out into the living room and could still see the thick white cover of whatever Dot wasn’t putting away in her hammerspace. She turned and stood on her toes, gazing up with wide eyes.

“What?” She repeated.

“I can see it behind your back.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Sis, I am a foot taller than you. I can see the smog from Fresno rise hours before you can. Just tell me what you’re trying to hide. Is it something for Wakko?”

“No.” Dot held the object up without any more prodding. “And it’s not for you, either.”

Yakko felt like he’d gotten flash bang when a vibrantly spelled out _Maria_ in white-and-purple cursive popped out at him. He covered the title with his palm and saw the usual front-page script credentials—“Property Of” Warner Bros.; “Directed By” Dennie Gordon; “Screenplay By” Julia Dahl and Jenny Bicks. He palmed through what had to be a little over 125 pages, catching overly used first and last names in film and snippets of dialogue that made him go “oh wow.”

“This is quite the breakfast menu,” he said more to Dot than himself this time. “You’re still hungry for this stuff?”

“A little less metaphorically and more astonishment would be nice, please and thank you.”

“Didn’t you just get done with a movie back in August and some bit parts in November?”

“Yes, Yakko,” Dot answered slowly with a slower eye roll. “I am an actress. That is why I’m doing another movie to continue to _be_ an actress.”

“I see. So you got the lead?”

“The script’s agent-approved. That’s good enough for me.” Dot reached for the pages, but Yakko held them above his head. “Give it.”

“Don’t worry, I will. Give me an hour and fifteen to see what we’re dealing with.” He flipped through the pages at rapid speed, shuddering slightly as he sat on the couch. “Better give me an extra half hour. I smell an unrealistically happy ending and shoehorned in romance.”

Dot sucked her teeth but didn’t offer up any complaints or illegal threats. She waved over her shoulder, mumbling for him to have fun while she headed upstairs. Yakko waited until she was both out of sight and for the clock to hit 7:15 a.m. to start reading.

From the descriptions and exposition Jenny and Julia were bleeding out, some socially awkward teenage girl (flanked by the school geek and a rough and tumble tomboy, her only friends in the entire world it seemed) wanted nothing more than to survive her junior year at her new school unscathed so she could graduate early (and most likely get into some Ivy League school because her smarts were that underrated).

Sprinkled here and there were this chic’s unsettlingly girly internal debates she experienced mostly outside of school rather than in school where it made more sense; what would she say today, which club/team wanted her, should she be a two-faced, backstabbing sack of lies and deceit just because some blonde with a big house in Beverly Hills said so.

Somewhere along the lines there was a love interest, bickering parents, a teacher who sounded like he needed a restraining order, and a little guardian angel for the protagonist to turn to in her darkest moments. It was called Maria (“oh wow,” Yakko mumbled on time), it was more of an on again/off again commentator than a full-time conscience, and it didn’t make an appearance until 52 minutes in to reading the script.

Yakko raised both eyebrows at the clock, then back down. Yeah, almost an hour with 64 pages and counting. Was that where Dot came in?

“You never cared to look over my scripts before.”

_What impeccable timing._

“You never cared to come home with one.”

Dot shrugged, out of her everyday clothes and in her bathrobe stuffed with tissue and Vicks. She held the steaming mug Yakko had made in both hands and made herself comfortable beside him.

“Dean likes to surprise me. How do you like it so far?”

“You want the truth?”

She nodded, took a sip of the drink, and almost spat it out. “Wait, no—”

“I think it’s a predictable sanitized Mary-Kate and Ashley play set you’d see Lohan or Duff skipping through.” Yakko smirked at the warning look he received and turned to the next page. “Little girls would definitely enjoy this, and if we’ve got pancake mix in the cabinet, this’ll do for all the syrupy sweetness we’ll need for the next six months.”

Dot shot him a darker look over her mug. “Thank you, Siskel and Ebert. Give it thirteen years. It’ll be a cult classic with the girls.”

Those two words did not work together. A classic for girls, huh? Yakko was already imagining the cover art for its theatrical poster to be as bubbly as the title’s font to reel in anyone under sixteen. Heck, all of the characters − aside from whoever Warner Bros. had playing Miss Anxiety − would probably be photocopied in bubbles around the leading lady’s head as she broke the fourth wall.

Where would that leave his sister in a predominantly human cast, he wondered immediately after. Sitting on a shoulder? Drawn in the corner? In the palm of a hand?

“So this is what we’re looking forward to this year.” Yakko gave a thumbs up. “Good to know.”

“It’s the 2000s,” Dot stated matter-of-factly, finishing up half of the drink. “Get with the decade, old man. I’m a teen idol now.”

Yakko was so glad she was the one drinking and not him. A grin took over his entire face, being the temporary buffer from the loud and very bemused laugh that escaped seconds later. Dot slammed the mug on the coffee table, cheeks puffed and red.

“Well, I am!”

This made Yakko laugh harder even after Dot punched him in the arm and snatched the script back. He hugged her shoulders once he’d tamed the laughing fit to a mere chuckle and brought her close to his side, ignoring her sinking into the cushions and baring her teeth.

“C’mon sis, think about what you just said. A teen idol?”

“I know what I said.”

“You really want to cater to a limited but hormonally imbalanced audience of adolescents?”

“I know what I want.”

Yakko pointed at the 125 or more pages. “And this is it, Maria?”

Dot gripped the script tighter in front of her, crossing one leg over the other. Yakko had nothing to say to that and kept looking between the apparent vehicle for a starting teenaged career and Dot’s hard expression. What made her even consider being a teen idol in the first place?

 _Teen idol_. It didn’t roll off the tongue very well.

Folks like David Cassidy, Rudy Vallée, or even the Beatles were the faces that popped to mind if Yakko thought of a teen idol. People that hadn’t had the pressures of being aware of their public image because they hadn’t been exposed to it during their teenage years. The only teen thing about them was being idolized by wildly enthusiastic, teenage female fans. Generational attitudes had changed; now it was all about not giving the wrong message to these teenyboppers and having a lot of responsibility if they were going to be emulated.

It had been the same thing back in the 80s with the boom of teenagers in film, and in the 90s the label had been smacked aggressively onto any pretty boy or girl who could sing and dance. Now there was a rise of all sorts of kids over at Disney and Nickelodeon doing it all as young as thirteen − singing, dancing, acting, and being loyal to their…unique fashion.

But his own baby sister? A teen idol for Warner Bros.?

“Hello? Earth to Yakko. Hey!” Dot shook his arm. “I said yes, like, four times. Didn’t you hear me?”

“Sorry. I’m still so invested in this cinematic work of art and can’t get over it. I mean, they were doing Truth Or Dare at Britney’s house and you-know-who’s never been kissed. O-M-G, am I right?”

Dot punched his arm again. “Shut up. I said yes, so can I do this movie?”

Yakko repeated the question in his head and crossed his arms, unable to hide the slight bite in his tone.

“You gave me those defensive looks, jaded answers, and a bruise on my arm only to ask for my permission in the end? You’re bound by contract with a studio and dependent on an agent finding you work, and you still want your older brother’s input?”

“Can I just get an answer?”

“No.”

Dot rolled her eyes and crossed her arms too, leaning forward with the makings of a glare on her small face.

“Okay. Is that a ‘no’ as in I can’t get an answer, or a ‘no’ as in you won’t let me be in the movie?”

Yakko met her halfway, poking his nose into her own.

“Whatever this girl does, Maria magically gets involved in the little world she’s created in her head, too.”

“So?”

“So apparently she works for an unemployment agency now, because she’s being an angel giving Mister Popular a ‘fun little _job_ ’ for the night on account of a dare. What do you think I mean now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it’s in my profile, but in case you lovely readers didn’t know, I’m also on [Tumblr](https://mugmanlivesmatter.tumblr.com/). I’m forever grateful for all the love and comments you guys give me! Thanks for reading! 💙


	25. Toon-Age Angst

Dot gazed around the romantic ivy-colored church, at the bowties and the dresses and the suits, trying to soak in the atmosphere. An energy that should’ve made her giggle and her body want to move even if she was supposed to be still. Instead her pulse ran more than her nose had that morning and the insultingly pale dress they shoved in her arms kept taunting her, “You’re washed out! You’re washed out!”

Her eyebrows frowned in worry and impatience as she fiddled with the tiny ribbons on her heels. From where she sat on one of the pillars, hidden from the cameras, Dot couldn’t stop biting her lip. She wanted to get up and pace around, but then became irritable when she realized she couldn’t. Her stomach was in knots and the anxiety-provoking questions in her mind wouldn’t shut up.

What if she fell? The mic was still on her, right? Should she sit a different way? Were her panties showing?

Like an otherworldly sixth sense, Dot straightened up and relaxed the tension in her cheeks, putting on the proudest smile she could muster below a gaggle of squealing girls. Lights reflected from a gorgeous crimson bouquet, dazzling up the blonde bride-to-be’s astonished smile as she threw the flowers over her shoulder.

Dot watched all the females rush forward and counted to seven like they had done in rehearsal. She reached out with both arms, pressed her shaking legs tightly together, and watched almost in slow motion as the bouquet burst like a firecracker. If it weren’t for the startled shrieks, one would have gone on figuring it was part of the ceremony.

Without a second thought, Dot leapt from the pillar and caught as many of the scattered petals before gravity pulled her down. She bounced off someone’s head and held what she could of the former flower arrangement.

“Mena Suvari isn’t the only one who can rock a pile of roses.”

“Cut!”

The extras groaned, the makeup and cleanup crew rushed to the floor, and Dennie Gordon looked like she was ready to be on her third cup of coffee. Dot fashioned the petals in between the folds of her dress to stall making her way over to the director’s beckoning finger.

“Hi Dennie,” she crooned with a wide smile.

“I thought I told you this production was not going to rely heavily on ad-libs. You don’t think I’ve been counting? You’ve done twenty-four too many. Stick to the script.”

“I don’t suppose the bouquet was meant to _explode_. I kept the ball rolling, didn’t I?”

“That I can make an exception for. What you cannot do,” Dennie stressed and poked Dot in the chest, “is use your cast mates as your physical comedy props.”

“It was a heat of the moment thing.” Dot shrugged at the scowl cementing itself on the woman’s forehead. “I couldn’t see him. It’s not like I used his kidneys as a springboard. Also, why do I have to be sitting up on that high thing, anyway? Why can’t I be in the crowd?”

The lady director held two fingers to her temple, slouching in her chair in exasperation and vision narrowing to a pinprick as an intern handed her something hot to drink. Dot copied the expression and tilted her head.

“You can’t be in the crowd because you were not written to be in the crowd,” Dennie answered like she was helping a child solve two plus two. “You’re a figment of Abby’s imagination. Lucky her,” she muttered in poor volume.

“Sure, but see”—Dot jumped into her lap, fishing out a copy of the script and getting Dennie to almost choke from the abrupt weight—“I’m meant to help this girl through hell, so can I actually, I don’t know, do it? Like here. Abby’s freaking out because she got her period late, she’s gotta swim with the in-crowd, a whole life or death thing. Did Maria drown or something? Where’s the help?”

“I’ll quote Julia when we spoke on the phone. ‘Sometimes there’s an overwhelming anxiety that even this toon can’t joke or skip around, and Abigail can’t blame them both.’”

“For a period?”

“Get off me, please.”

Dot groaned and did as told, but Dennie didn’t realize the living _Carrie_ nightmare had been done to death. She really thought the final nail in the coffin had been back in the late 90s, which—Dot shuddered and clung to the hem of her dress—had only been three or four years ago. It was so weird to think that, and even weirder to think that 1990 as a whole had ended only twelve years ago. Television was changing, skirts were getting shorter, and people were thinking and saying things differently.

They were really in the 21st century now, saying hi to new millennials and doing what would have been taboo fifty years ago.

“…realistic in the shaken mind of this girl,” Dennie was saying, and whatever she was preaching had Dot rolling her eyes to high heaven.

_Yes honey, nothing screams realistic than talking to a drawing instead of seeking therapy._

When the director glared, Dot smiled and wiggled her fingers to draw attention away from speaking her thoughts. But hey, if she had spoken one thing on her mind by accident, there was no point in being mute like this supposed guardian angel.

“You want realistic? Don’t get in the pool just because a dame called you chicken. Walk away. Find a woman and ask if she has any extra tampons.”

Dennie moved to speak a second too late. Dot was already back on her lap, waving the script in her face.

“And another thing. I haven’t done anything in a high school setting − thanks for casting me by the way, hon − but do counselors exist in this universe? Other immediate family? Pen pals?”

The only noise Dennie got out was inhaling in preparation for a rebuttal, but she wasn’t given the chance.

“Because honestly, this girl’s going the extra mile to be a grade-A bitch when she doesn’t need to be. She’s lucky I haven’t come to life to smack some sense into her. Speaking of Maria, this is not her color,” Dot stated, gesturing to the bridesmaid dress, “and two, I would just love to know if she can actually get off her ass and do what she’s been drawn to do. Help. Preferably before the second act ends.”

Dot batted her eyes, marking off her tangent and allowing for Dennie to say her piece. All the director did was stare, take a long sip of whatever she had been given, and without warning stood up fast. Dot scowled from her place on the ground, rubbing her backside as the woman in charge observed the slightly less chaotic film set. She took one more sip from that obnoxiously caffeinated beverage and handed it off to a passing sound man.

“Let’s get this rolling correctly. First position people!”

Lady directors. You give ’em an inch and they walk all over you in their D’Orsays and skin-tight denim jeans. Dot didn’t get it. A good chunk of the movie was being shepherded by females, but she wasn’t accounted for. She hadn’t been necking bottles of DayQuil for nothing; she needed starting powers like Dennie Gordon to get her growing for a John Waters setting down the road or in a _Bring It On_ mindset three years from now.

The only lead role she had done blurred the lines (and reviews) of whether the previous “little princess” of the Warner trio was ready to star in something mature for her determined age. If Dot was still so young and cute as they said, then who was stopping her from starting over and going for a part that wasn’t that old for her?

_Yakko._

“Quiet on the set, please!”

It wasn’t fair. No, it wasn’t right. He acted like they hadn’t been exposed to anything risqué or perverse during their work in television. For five years straight, he and Wakko had been written to lust over the studio nurse and make jokes that really should’ve had their own private ratings. He had no right to say Dot couldn’t do a movie just because of one naughty bit. (A naughty bit that had since been written out.)

_That damn hypocrite._

“Roll camera.”

“Rolling!”

Yakko hadn’t even let her explain, either. Nothing obscene was going to happen or be shown on camera − now or ever − and Maria wasn’t always going to be repeating Abby’s unmonitored actions. Dot had tried telling him, but he hadn’t listened. He never listened.

“Speed…”

This was actually a chance to debut in front of a newer audience. Maybe those that had grown up watching Dot and her brothers in the 90s were in high school by now, and then they would see her again and remember her from their childhood, and they’d feel all grown up and nostalgic. The energy she put into thinking of becoming an idol, specifically for a fanbase four years older, suddenly moved her super close to dry heaving.

Dot took in a breath, struggling to push down her coughs and massage the tingling out of her temples. She could barely feel the pillar under her dress, and her heart was racing and beating unevenly at the same time. She wasn’t even letting the thought of debuting in a teen film excite her anymore; this was from something else. She heard herself mumble “oh God” and saw the replaced bouquet sailing for her, the cue she never got to, before everything slapped into darkness.

A wedge between having to hack and vomit stabbed itself in the middle of her throat the moment she came to. Dot winced, brows furrowed tight in pain and concussed by a headache. She rubbed the water spots from her vision, trying to focus and sit up. A hand went to her shoulder and put her in reverse, telling her to “take it easy.”

She cursed under her breath, wondering if she was blushing from the situation or running a fever.

“I’ll give you that, but only that,” Yakko said.

Dot crossed her arms. “If you’re going to yell, I’d rather you do it now.”

“If I’m going to yell, I’d rather you be conscious.”

“I am.” A muscle in Dot’s right eye flexed. She covered it with an arm and sighed. “Lay it on me before I pass out. Again.”

She was met with radio silence and breathed out slowly the longer it grew. The lump in her throat had dulled in that amount of time, and her headache at least had the decency to stay still. Her cheeks felt hot, getting her to believe that if she hadn’t remembered being moved from the studio lot all the way back to the apartments, it must have been a doozy of a black out.

When Dot lowered her arm, she saw Yakko seated a few feet from her on the couch, peering sightlessly at a wall with his chin in his hands. Oh yeah, it must have been really bad.

“I feel like we’ve been here before,” he muttered. “Things start off fine, then end on the brink of some petty argument.”

Dot rolled her eyes and sunk further into the cushions. “Something tells me this won’t end on the brink of anything,” she said quietly.

“You are my sister.” Yakko leaned into the couch, crossing his arms, too. “So, I just would love to know how it makes sense for you to complain of a migraine this morning, then go off sneaking to the studio for...” He checked his watch. “Seven hours of work.”

“I thought it was a migraine, but turns out it wasn’t. And I didn’t sneak out if I walked out and you weren’t around.”

“You pulled the clothes-under-the-covers stunt again.”

“My covers are just really thick.”

“Come on Dot, you’re better than this.”

Dot didn’t know why Yakko saying that made her so sensitive all of a sudden. What could she blame the tears on this time? Side effects from the DayQuil? A headache? Hormones? Did “nine-year-old” toons even get hormones?

“You just don’t want me doing the movie ’cause of that one part,” she eventually mumbled, quickly rubbing her eyes when Yakko wasn’t looking. “My character was never gonna do it, you know. It’s PG-13.”

“You think I’m—” Yakko cut himself off with a laugh. “Oh boy. Really? Playing this card a second time? No, no, no, no.”

Dot ground her teeth while her tail curled under her to keep from lashing out.

“Look, this whole tween breakthrough you wanna do? It’s weird and out of nowhere, but I’m glossing over it ’til it actually matters. You’re not doing yourself a favor by running around and doing seven things at once.”

“I’m fine.” Dot wished she hadn’t coughed her brains out before saying that.

“Clearly you’re not.”

“You don’t need to treat me like I’m a kid.”

“Clearly I do.”

The wedge in Dot’s throat was back. The tears were also making a return and the swaying headache crashed the party not a second too late. She sat up and hugged her knees. God, why her? Why did she have to pass out while filming? They’d been doing so well! A little over a week in production and they were on the road to completion in two and a half months.

Dennie was going to say something to a producer, and that producer was going to get into contact with Julia or Jenny or whoever, and if she got fired from this supporting role all because her brother wanted her to stay home, it would be on Dot’s head. If she didn’t get any movie under her belt by the end of the year, Dean was going to have a panic attack and she was going to have to make so many public appearances so someone, anyone could see her potential. She didn’t want to take any sick leaves and needed to get the naysayers off her shoulders, but she didn’t want to go around Burbank spreading germs or pass out on set again.

 _She didn’t have to, she had to, she didn’t need to, she wanted too…_ Yippee, now it was starting to feel like a migraine.

“I hate you.”

Dot’s voice came out small but her glare was large. Her eyes were still wet and her cheeks were growing hotter out of anger than a possible fever.

Her and Yakko’s eyes met, and the latter was unfazed by what had been said and asked, “A little early to be rushing into some teenage angst, aren’t we?”

Dot made sure he caught her glorious eye roll as she slid off the couch, but the nails in her skull made her forget how she should have been expecting his hearing to be on point when she grumbled her way over to the stairs.

“Would you like to enunciate that mid-life crisis like a proper actress does?”

Dot stopped on the fourth step, her tail going rigid and her fist tightening at her side. Something like a sigh escaped through gritted teeth as she repeated without any fear in her voice, “I said you can take the ‘angst’ I _don’t_ have and stick it.”

She watched Yakko watching her from his place on the couch, never blinking once. He got to his feet and calmly slid his hands in his pockets, stepping in front of her and leaning down until their noses were inches apart.

“And just who do you think you’re talking to?”

“There’s only two of us here. Take a wild guess.”

Dot shouldn’t have felt an adrenaline rush so raw and powerful, like she was pulling a Special Friend stunt on _Animaniacs_. Her pulse had picked up again and her fist tightened stronger at her side. A glib tongue was one thing, but crass sass was playing a whole different game.

“I don’t suppose you know where your manners just ran off to.”

“Over the river and through the woods.” And she was still doing it! What the hell was with her?

A hard look of annoyance crossed Yakko’s face. “You think this is funny?”

“You tell me.” _I’m gonna be grounded until Pat Benatar gets a number one hit._

“Better stop while you’re ahead. You’re skating on some mighty thin ice.”

“No, I’m standing on a very plump shag carpet.” _Stop it!_

“Dorothy Ann Marie Warner…”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.” She wanted to punch herself. That’s it, she was punching herself. She couldn’t bring her arms to move, but as soon as she could, she wasn’t showing herself any mercy.

Yakko didn’t look like he was going to be showing much mercy, either; where he should have been yelling at Dot for being this uncontrollable brat out of the blue, for being so churlish and verbally unattractive, he substituted for a sharp point up the stairs and a low, “Go to your room.”

Dot didn’t offer any offhand remarks and ran upstairs, slamming her door shut and hitting her back against the wood. A cold stress in her eyes faded until they were dark and empty. She slid onto her carpet, pulling at her hair and jamming her knees so tight into her chest she thought she broke a rib. She locked the door immediately after the thought came to mind and felt everything − the fevered headache, the frustration and self-disgust, the nausea, chills and tears − coming for her at once.


	26. Cards Against Insanity

Wakko had finally decided to bring another book into his room to keep his mind busy and hisself entertained. Funny thing was, he hadn’t been reaching for the autobiography when Yakko stormed into the den, asking where Dot was. It just so happened the book had been where his fingers stopped and he had grabbed the first thing they touched when the sounds of war erupted soon after. He told himself for the past three days that he would only read as a distraction from whenever the caged fights went on downstairs, because he figured he’d find the time to enjoy the memoir in full eventually.

Much like the name of Joan Rivers’ book, Yakko and Dot were _still talking_.

“Nothing you can say is going to change that!”

“Wanna bet? You’re grounded.”

Well, more like going in and out of raised voices, but Wakko didn’t need to get technical. He sighed and flipped to the next page.

“Anything else?”

“No movies for two weeks.”

“In what sense, genius?”

“Both.”

Wakko spared a glance to an empty spot in the corner. He was sure there’d be a ringing in his ears if he was down there, sitting on the couch trying to read, while Yakko and Dot went back and forth behind him. He re-focused on Rivers’ words from the heart and soul, picking up more from downstairs.

“Is that all you got?”

“Don’t test me.”

“Go ahead. I dare you. I _dare_ you.”

It got quiet after that. An unsettling, what-on-earth-happened, did-he-strike-deaf kind of quiet. Footsteps stomped upstairs, a door opened and slammed shut, and the apartment went quiet once more. Whatever had stopped the drama, Dot probably went one _I dare you_ too far and both she and Wakko knew better than to test Yakko’s patience.

Wakko could feel the tension slipping under the cracks of his door to wrap around him, like a ghostly chill, but he was quick to shake it off and left for the hallway. He knocked a soft “Shave and a Haircut” twice on Dot’s decorated door before peeking inside. She was curled in a tight ball on her bed and squeezing her pillow. Her tail was in between her legs, and parts of her hair were frizzed up along the back. Wakko slipped inside, being sure to close the door behind him, and climbed halfway up the bed’s foot post.

“S’Alright?” He asked her quietly. No response. “S’Okay?”

Dot took in a huffy breath and kicked at nothing by her feet, so there was at least noise as opposed to silence. Wakko couldn’t help smiling.

“You wanna tell me what you and Yakko were fighting about?”

Dot turned her head away. Wakko twisted around the bed post for a second before landing on the blankets and putting a hand on the small of her back. She flinched, but he didn’t see it as a warning to leave her alone. He started rubbing small circles in the more tense spots and watched both tail and fur gradually settle down.

“It’ll be okay.” Wakko still spoke low and gentle. “You’ll be okay.”

Dot snuck a glance up at him with one eye, looking around his face for some kind of double reassurance. Wakko’s smile grew when he had her attention, and he carefully poked her cheek with his pinky.

“Are you gonna tell me what you and Yakko were fighting about now?”

He said the secret word again. Dot hid her face and turned her back to him, letting out another frustrated sigh. Wakko held back one of his own, unsure of how to get anything out of his sister without making her even more upset. Then again, she was stubborn as a mule when it came to arguments or admitting she was wrong, and judging by how she was still clinging to this grudge, it had probably been really bad.

Dot could go hours without speaking to Wakko, and vice versa, whenever they got into it. Usually by the end of the day things rewound back to normal. They mostly got things out of their system with hair pulling, or pushing, or calling one another names, and by nightfall they would’ve exhausted the energy in staying mad.

Wakko wasn’t sure how Yakko and Dot dealt with their bickering. The few ones he’d witnessed or listened in on didn’t involve any touching or name calling, so he didn’t think he could truly call it bickering. Their tones often bordered between rough sibling banter and being passive-aggressive. They talked a lot and got more stuff off their chests, but that just charged them up to keep going.

“I think you guys should talk soon,” Wakko heard himself say, jumping back to reality with his thoughts in tow. “Talk, not joke or shout. I heard the noise, but not a lot. I mostly heard you ‘cause you have a big mouth.”

“Thanks.” It was mumbled and annoyed, but it was a word.

“Are you gonna run down to Martino’s? Once they see you, they’ll know exactly what you need.” Wakko got a pillow to the chest and breathed out a silent _thank you_ that Dot missed his face. The makeup-covered bruise had gotten more sensitive. “What? Comfort food is everything! I only said that ‘cause I know when you get like this, it isn’t pretty.”

“I know what I do,” Dot huffed.

Wakko nodded, tongue lolled out slightly in concentration on what to say next.

“So…no to Martino’s?” Silence again. “Sis, seriously. Are you okay?”

“Who knows?” Dot finally rolled over to face him, crossing her arms as she did. “Who even knows what we are, or how we got here, or how old we actually are? I can tell you right now that I’m not a baby or a child. I’m…”

Wakko waited for her to continue, genuinely curious, but after another spout of silence she didn’t pick up. Dot sighed, almost in defeat as her ears flattened and she stared at a spot somewhere over Wakko’s shoulder.

“I don’t know what I am,” she confessed.

“A mess.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No, I mean you’ve still got a full face on.” Wakko rolled up a sleeve and swiped at the smudged pastel colors. “You’ll get it over everything if you don’t stop crying.”

“I wasn’t crying.”

Wakko chuckled and continued to clean her face. “A rabbit should have such pink eyes,” he teased.

Dot puffed her cheeks out but didn’t put up a fight. “I have wipes in the bathroom. Don’t do that. You’ll stain your clothes.”

“Then I’ll look pretty on the outside.”

Wakko wasn’t sure if Dot laughed at the Valley Girl impression he did on purpose or just at what he’d said in general, but whatever it was had worked. He smiled and laughed with her, scrubbing a little harder near her dimples before having to fetch the wipes.

He told any jokes that came to mind while he cleaned her face and asked what was new around Burbank since she was out more than him and Yakko. Of course Dot couldn’t help dishing out “the best” from what she’d overheard or seen at the studio, and Wakko really didn’t care for fruity gossip, but if talking like a tabloid helped his sister feel better, he’d sit through it.

Even when it felt like a good hour had passed, Wakko still noticed Yakko’s lacking presence and had to guess (to keep from getting upset) that he was either out for a walk or in the sunroom. Dot hadn’t seemed to pick up on it and was now fumbling with the plastic cases of her makeup she’d piled on her bed.

Wakko lazily shuffled a pack of cards taken off her nightstand, and when their eyes met and Dot shyly held up what looked to be a tray of glittery colors, he nodded. Something was better than nothing.

“You’re not going to ask anymore?” Dot asked five minutes into rubbing something on his cheeks with the largest brush he’d ever seen.

“Ask what?”

“You know what.”

Wakko shrugged, both at what she was implying and at which color blue he wanted. “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to, but I still think you and Yakko should make up later.”

“Third time’s a charm. Come on, ask me again. I’ll answer this time.” Dot hesitated and lowered her voice a bit. “I was pretty loud, so sorry if I bothered you.”

Wakko risked a peek over to the door, lowering his own voice to ask, “What was it about?”

“Yakko’s been getting on my nerves for _days_. I don’t…head back, eyes closed. I don’t know why. He’s got this hawk eye on my movies all of a sudden.”

“Is there something he doesn’t like?”

“Okay, here’s some context for you. Dean called me back in February and said the studio had some projects they wanted to refocus on. They had to be postponed from the September attacks, and they figured just producing one after the mania calmed down would be okay.” Dot’s lips pursed slightly and she got a vertical wrinkle between her eyebrows as she lined something under Wakko’s chin. “I guess they jumped out of bed and said, ‘hey, we should do three movies at once.’”

Wakko’s jaw dropped. “You’re doing three movies?”

“I wish. Some other studio bid for one of the scripts, so we’re kind of scrambling with different actors and directors for these last two. When I don’t have to be on set, Dean’s trying to get me doing guest appearances at workshops and visiting method acting studios. He’s still on me when I gave ink,” she added bitterly. “Or blood. I don’t know. But now I have to be on the studio grounds more often ever since I got a role in _Maria_. It’s one of the newer projects, and I’m pumped for it. It’s my first teen movie, so it’s like…I get to start being a teen.”

Wakko didn’t see the big hurrah in being cast specifically for a teen movie, but Dot’s mood was lifting. Her tail had even wagged at the mention of ‘teen’ and her hands were working faster with the makeup.

“Just imagine being a child star in the nineties,” she went on, “then you get to grow up with your fans and be teenagers with them.”

Wakko couldn’t. Scratch that, he wouldn’t. Being a kid on television was so much more fun and freer than having to be one whole teen carrying an entire movie. Yakko didn’t count; he was more of a good in between, and besides, Wakko and Dot just saw him as their older brother. Dot was still going on about the role and how she would be the only toon on set, but Wakko still couldn’t imagine being drawn “four years older” and having to deal with all the responsibilities teenagers had. Whatever they may be.

 _See?_ He thought. _I don’t even know what they have to deal with. Kids don’t have anything to worry about._

Then his ears drooped. Dot sounded so happy about playing a teenager. Did she really hate being seen as so small?

“…about it all of a sudden and making me feel like I have to wimp out.”

“Maybe Yakko’s right.” Wakko fidgeted with his sleeves, unsure of why he was now siding with him if what Dot did made her happy, but something just wasn’t sitting right. “Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this movie.”

A heavy silence polluted the bedroom. Dot hadn’t stopped making up Wakko’s face, but she had to keep grabbing a set of wipes and was gripping his chin tighter than ever. Wakko lightly pushed her wrist down, raising his brows for some kind of reply. She rolled her eyes and held his head steady for some red on his lips.

“Oh yeah? Then what should I be doing, if you know so much?”

“What you’re best at. Television.” Wakko dropped his gaze to his knees for a second, squeezing his T-shirt tighter. “Do you ever miss being on television? Having a steady role on something so much…easier? Being with friends you can call family? Being…in a cartoon?”

This time Dot stopped what she was doing, staring hard into her brother’s eyes, and the cue for Yakko to knock and soon open her door couldn’t have been worse.

“Sis, c’mere. I need to talk to you.”

“You can come in.”

“If I come in, Wakko has to leave. What is that on his face?”

“Macy’s, Sephora, Italian brands I can never pronounce.” Dot snapped the cap on the lipstick in time to Wakko’s heart picking up speed. “Why does he have to leave?”

“Because I said I need to talk to you, not him.”

“What if I want him in here to witness this?”

Yakko raised one brow. “You make it sound like I’m gonna murder you. I just want to talk.”

“That’s what they always say before the fall. Next thing you know, you’re shoved in the back of a van or smelling chloroform—”

“Dot…” Now Yakko was starting to sound tired. Or ticked off. Almost like a moody teenager. “I don’t have time for jokes.”

Wakko knew he was supposed to stay out of it, he knew he shouldn’t stretch the situation out any further, but it flew out of his mouth before he could stop it. Like a kid.

“He doesn’t have time for jokes?”

Dot snickered and nudged his arm. “I know, right?”

“Don’t you jump into this, too, Wak. I already have one reason for a headache.” Yakko looked over at Dot, then back to Wakko. “I don’t need another.”

Dot grabbed Wakko’s arm before he could leave, whispering, “If I suddenly go missing, check the Canadian border.”

Wakko’s laugh was more from nerves than amusement, and he ducked his head as he passed Yakko on his way out. He shut the door once he was in the hall but didn’t immediately go. He was fidgeting faster with his shirt and sweat was building up inside his gloves. He looked back and forth between his door and Dot’s, let out a deep breath, then produced a glass cup and held it to the wood.

“…trying. Why don’t you give it a rest already?” That was Yakko, clear as day.

“I’m not trying anything.” That was Dot.

“After I speak, you’ve always got something smart to say back.”

“Isn’t that how a conversation works?”

“ _Dot…_ ” Yakko stressed her name so hard Wakko shivered.

“Oh, so whenever you make smartass jokes, it’s fine. But when I do it, it’s not good?”

“There’s a time and place for everything, Miss Potty Mouth. Ugh, listen to me. Do I really have to play parent? I’m not up for it tonight.”

“Sure. Let’s just smile and hug it out, you can unground me, and I’ll be driving into town for my next press conference to announce my joint project with Leslie Nielsen.”

If Dot’s sarcasm was any thicker, Wakko would probably be seeing it floating above Long Beach tomorrow morning. He leaned into the cup when all that followed was silence and was tempted to squeeze his ear under the door.

“Do you want to? You’d still be grounded, but you wouldn’t be throwing a hissy fit.”

Dot laughed out loud, sarcasm still on her. “Stuck in this apartment for two weeks, but at least I can smile about it. Why not? Let’s hug and make it official.”

A longer silence followed after that. Wakko heard Yakko say something else, but it was too low to make out. He waited for a response from Dot, but she had none to give. For a second he thought maybe, just maybe, they were actually hugging. They would be super weird and on an entirely different spectrum of mood swings if they were doing that, but at least they’d remember they were brother and sister and didn’t need to act so cutthroat towards one another. The door suddenly opened, and with a yelp Wakko went tumbling down. He watched the glass roll under the bed and slowly glanced up at Yakko.

“Might as well talk to Miss 007 if you don’t want to talk to me tonight.”

Wakko jumped up to dust his clothes off, staring after Yakko as he headed for his room, then turned to Dot, eyes wide in confusion.

“What’d he say?”

“Like you didn’t hear.”

“I didn’t. I think I had the glass in the wrong spot for that one.”

Dot shook her head and went to her dresser, taking out a shirt/skirt ensemble.

“It wasn’t important. Really,” she insisted at the look she received. “Don’t forget to wash that off before you go to bed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to change.”

“Where you going?”

Dot shook her head again and shooed Wakko out, locking the door behind him and mumbling something under her breath along the way. He blinked for a second, put two and two together, then smiled a tiny bit. Martino’s was definitely getting a late-night visitor.


	27. Fools in April

**April 1, 2002**

It all happened on April Fools, because of course it would. Why the hell not? The great, big universe was out to get the Warners if it was the last thing it did. One by one, the biggest joke of a month singled out each toon. Starting with the younger Warner brother.

Wakko woke up to a massive headache hunkered low in his temples. His throat felt like it was filled with straw, and a flash of warmth gathered like an oncoming thunderstorm only to fade as quickly as it had come. It concerned and puzzled him, and the fleeting moment of relief when he rolled over allowed him one thought.

_I hope I didn’t catch what Dot has._

A blunt pang took place of the former sharp and hard agony that had given him the glorious wake-up call. Wakko’s face and hands didn’t feel hot or clammy, he wasn’t cold, and aside from a twinge below his chest, he didn’t feel queasy—nor did he suddenly feel like drumming up any possible answers to match his lacking symptoms and literal pain in the neck.

He figured it was low blood sugar. It wasn’t like he was a stranger to it.

Slow and steady, Wakko shuffled across the carpet while rubbing his temples, failing to massage away the faintest ringing in his ears. When he got to the bathroom, the overall discomfort he felt slipped to the very bottom of his list of worries − much like he did on the floor. He tried stopping the fall but wound up banging a wrist on the wall and smacking his chin on the lower part of the door. Something wet stuck to his ankles, and when he finally managed to calm himself out of the heart-seizing shock and flip on the light, Wakko got to feel hot, clammy, cold, and queasy all at once.

“Dot…” He growled out.

As if the irritation had summoned her, he turned at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs and saw her holding a set of towels, dressed in he didn’t know what, but it looked like it was on backwards.

“Aw geeze.” Dot rushed into the cramped space, flopping what was in her arms on the floor and helping Wakko up. “Guess I should’ve just used my slippers to dry this or something.”

Several unasked questions crowded Wakko’s mouth, like why the floor was wet in the first place, or what Dot was doing up so early, or why her makeup was piled on the counter like a clearance sale. He put his throbbing wrist to his throbbing temple and groaned.

“Can you pass me the aspirin?”

“We’re out.”

“Faboo.”

“Check downstairs under the sink. There may be some Motrin stashed away.”

“Too far. I’ll sleep the pain away.”

Wakko stumbled back to his room, having little energy to close the door or properly get under the covers. A hot flash struck across his forehead, disappearing once he was off his feet. His chin stung from where it hit the door, and he thought he felt a bruise on his wrist when he couldn’t bend it a certain way.

Everything on him was just getting the piñata treatment.

Wakko wasn’t sure if Dot had followed him or had come in after cleaning up the bathroom, but he had no reaction to give when he heard her messing around his room. He ignored her for a while until he started smelling some kind of citrus-scented spray in the air and then something incredibly spicy when a mug was shoved in front of him.

“Drink this,” she ordered.

He did and instantly gagged. “Did you _dump_ the entire spice trade in here?”

“Just drink and don’t touch this,” Dot added, pushing a freezing cold washcloth on Wakko’s forehead. “Is it just your head that’s bothering you?”

“That, and the fact that you look like an escaped Scottish convict.”

“It’s a choice.”

“It’s hurting my eyes.”

Dot flicked Wakko’s nose, but he wasn’t so playful back when his instinct was to bite her finger.

“My body hurts plenty, thank you,” he stated at her wide-eyed surprise. He crossed his arms and lowered the cloth, finding an almost comforting relief in the chilly temperature. “Now can you tell me why you’ve got on a potato sack?”

“No, because you bit me.”

“Where you headed so early, then?”

“I’ve got…professional tasks to take care of. Some may be taking care of me, so the quicker I’m into it, the quicker I’m out of it.”

Wakko shrugged. “I guess.”

“I should be back around four, four-thirty. Hopefully. It depends on how bad traffic is and how fast I can move. Hey,” Dot suddenly started asking, her voice going soft and her hand going over Wakko’s, “you think you can cover me?”

“In what?”

“Just in case it takes me longer out there and Yakko gets all nosy, I need some kind of alibi. You can make up anything. I don’t know how long this studio—how long these errands will take. Can you do that for me?”

“Errands? I thought they were professional tasks.”

“Wakko, please?”

He peeked up from behind the washcloth at the familiarly sweet tone and saw Dot’s pouty bottom lip tremble and big doe eyes grow. Not having any more strength or interest to keep her entertained, Wakko closed his eyes and gave a lazy thumbs up that turned into a wave goodbye as Dot thanked him twice and kissed his cheek.

The second she closed the door, the sound sent another vibrating headache through his temples. Wakko refused to touch the mug, no matter how thirsty he got as the minutes passed. His off-balance concentration kept confusing the tangy-smelling aerosol for some kind of trick his nose was playing on him, even though Dot had most likely set out a candle or spread one of his essential oils.

If he could still smell things, then he guessed he wasn’t sick. Then again, Dot had once complained of smelling things that weren’t really there and had had one or two bad headaches that made her bedridden. Lately, she didn’t sound as congested when she first fell ill and she wasn’t coughing so hard anymore. Sneezing, yes. Complaining about feeling disgusting, oh yeah.

Wakko could count on one hand how many times he advised her to see a doctor if she felt any worse. Not that she ever listened to her own body or her own brothers. She acted as if going to the doctor, if anything led to it, was—

_Doctor._

Wakko bolted up, scattering the lukewarm cloth and his blanket to the floor as he hurried downstairs to check the kitchen wall clock. 1:43 p.m. He refused to believe he had fallen back asleep that fast and missed them. He had missed them! The very two appointments Scratchansniff had to shift earlier into the day because of a last minute blunder on the latter’s schedule. After that, he’d be driving off to who-knows-where, California and taking his wife and unpaid time off along for the ride until the 27th.

_“I won’t forget,” Wakko told Scratchansniff over and over. “I’ll write it down. I’ll remember. I’ll show up an hour early if you want me to.”_

But he did forget. He also forgot that in between those few days and some before them, too, he had mostly been around Dot. Keeping her company, listening to her frustrations, letting her touch up his face again and sticking close. Now look where it had gotten him; (possibly) sick as a dog with the memory of a goldfish, and he had to go three weeks and five days without seeing his psychiatrist.

Wakko wouldn’t feel right calling Scratchansniff after work hours, but he couldn’t write an entry as a substitute if he needed to talk to him. What if one day he really, really needed to talk to the doc? Could he still call when he was on UTO? Could he get in line first to make an appointment for the future? Wait no, that would be like cheating all the other patients. But he had been with Scratchy for _years_ , so wouldn’t that count a little more towards things? Or would that still make him selfish and wrong?

Something brushed against Wakko’s ear, making him violently jolt backwards and swing an arm out. He blinked into focus, and judging by the wild look in Yakko’s eye, he had either hit him on accident or come pretty close to it.

Wakko gripped the front of his shirt. “You scared me!”

“Really? I thought I put you in a chipper mood.”

Wakko hid a glare behind the palm smudging up his face and breathed out slowly. He was blanking out in his own kitchen, not recalling when he’d sat down or started biting his fingers. He put them in his mouth again, gnawing on his gloves and looking at everything on the walls and shelves. 

“Everything okay in here?” Yakko asked, waving his hand this time so Wakko could see him smooth down his hatless hair.

“I slept in.”

“I can tell. Good for you.”

“No, not good for me.”

“Oh, you’re so right. Getting in some healthy additional hours of sleep in the comforts of your own bed leaves a bad taste in my mouth just thinking about it.”

“So how come you don’t do it?”

Yakko didn’t have a comeback for that. He just stared at Wakko like he’d asked him to divide by zero. Wakko shook his head and mumbled for him to forget it, slowly easing his chin into his folded arms on the table. It was still sore. Yakko sat down across from him and copied his posture.

“You okay?” He repeated quietly.

“I dunno,” Wakko answered even quieter.

“Well, if you ever get around to it, I’d like to know.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m your brother, and if something’s on your mind, I’d like to help in any way, shape, or form.”

Wakko titled his head. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.” Yakko reached over to squeeze his hand, his soft smile turning serious. “Really Wakko, talk to me if you need to.”

“It’s…it’s you.” Wakko muttered the last bit into his arms.

“Gesundheit.”

“No, I said it’s you.”

“It’s me what?”

“You…” Wakko gazed down at the table, his fingers tapping the flat surface as his cheeks warmed up. “I think you, at least recently ’cause otherwise I wouldn’t say this, honestly I have to say that… Erm, well, it’s you.”

Yakko’s face couldn’t have looked any more raw in confusion. He straightened up in the chair, trying to piece together the odd stuttering and trailed off fragments before giving up and crossing his arms.

“I’m not having an identity crisis,” Yakko deadpanned when Wakko started over with ‘you’ again. “Tell _me_ what about _me_ seems to be bothering _you_.”

An uncontrollable silence stumbled into the conversation, making Wakko’s face burn hotter. Any time his gaze flicked from the crook of his arm to Yakko’s face, the corners of his mouth kept firming into a slight frown and the lower his eyebrows bent. Wakko’s tail squirmed under the dogged expression, thankfully out of view, and it took at least three times to clear his throat for him to utter Dot’s name.

Yakko blinked. “Now I’m lost. Is this lament about her or me?”

“A little bit of both.”

“Okay then, so we’re looking at both sides of the coin here. Go ahead, buddy. Start with one or the other.”

“Well…” When Wakko sighed, he could hear how exhausted he was and he’d just woken up. “I don’t like her working so hard, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Working hard and working _hard_ … There’s a difference, I know there is.”

“If you say it with enough emphasis, yeah.”

“I just don’t want her missing out on the fun of it all. We had fun during _Animaniacs_.”

Yakko nodded. “Sure.”

“Yeah.” Wakko fidgeted with the collar of his pajama top for a second, then started tracing circles on the table to get his mind focused on one thing at a time. “I told her she should probably stick to television if she’s not into movies anymore.”

“And what was the verdict?”

“You had walked in, remember? She never gave me an answer, and I never asked again.”

“Is that what you two were talking about when I caught her putting that gunk all over your face?”

Wakko pouted. “I liked it.”

Yakko nodded and poked his nose. “Whatever makes you happy, little missy.”

Another silence spread fast, almost drowning out the humming frigidaire and Wakko’s impromptu finger tap dance on the table. He took in a breath and forced his back to straighten up.

“Yakko, do you think Dot should be on TV again?”

“Good question, but I don’t have an answer for that.”

“Even though you have all the answers whenever you tell her what to do all the time?”

He shrugged. “That’s my job.”

“No. Your job is to pester her with me. We hide her makeup and make fun of her clothes or hair until she starts throwing things at us. Then we all call a truce at the end of the day, watch a movie, and switch places.”

“Shoot. Am I being demoted?”

Wakko didn’t like the fact that Yakko was joking around the matter. Or that he sounded bored and lifeless while doing it. He sat a little taller in his seat, shaking his head and pointing.

“You really do tell her what to do, and she doesn’t like it. She says you treat her like a little girl.”

“As opposed to what? A lamb? Actually,” Yakko interrupted himself, slowly moving to leave the kitchen, “you know what? I’ve been meaning to do this at some point whenever one of us gets like this.”

“Like this?” Wakko didn’t like, no, he hated the sound of that. _Like this._ What was that supposed to mean?

“It’s old-fashioned, but then again so are we.”

“What is it?”

“Family meeting.”

Wakko definitely hated the sound of that. Family meetings were just sad and sorry excuses to get together in one room and scream louder than the other. They were so dumb. Nothing ever got resolved at one of those things, and they made a session with Scratchansniff seem like Disneyland.

“We never needed to have one before,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, well, new year, new us. We’ll shoot for tonight. Be a carrier pigeon and pass it on to Dot, would ya?”

Wakko rolled his eyes. He could hardly wait to sit around the living room, watching his oldest brother and little sister argue back and forth while he acted as the middleman. As always.

“Guess I’ll share the news when she gets back.”

Yakko stepped back through the swinging door. “Run that by me one more time. Back from where? She’s grounded.”

 _Uh oh._ “Oh, uh, just out. For a walk. Air.”

From where Yakko stood, it looked like he was going through his own trying headache as he muttered under his breath and left a second time. Wakko immediately scrambled out of his chair and clamored through the passthrough window, clumsily somersaulting in front of his feet.

“Where you going?”

“To my room. But judging by that fabulous dismount”—Yakko tilted Wakko’s nervously grinning face up and quirked a brow—“and the sweat forming on your temples, I take it Dot’s not getting fresh air?”

Wakko gave him a look. “In Burbank? You’d be lucky to find a cloud that’s not brown.”

“Touché.” Yakko stepped forward only for his foot to be grabbed. “Wakko, _off_.”

“Why can’t you stay down here with me?”

“I would prefer writing out my anger than feeling it gather up all at once the minute Dot walks through that very door. Unless you know where she is, I will kick you.”

“I know nothing.” Wakko held up his hands at the unamused glare he received. “I’m telling the truth! She didn’t tell me where she was going, just…”

“Just?” Yakko repeated, not missing a beat.

 _Oh boy, sorry sis._ “Just…that…she’s running errands or something.”

“And you bought that?”

Wakko wasn’t expecting such a dry question from his own brother or to feel how hard it made his heart thump. He made it sound like Dot was a compulsive liar! That was just wrong. In the past Wakko had thought some things of her, sure, but never had his thoughts painted her like she was a lost cause.

“It didn’t sound like she was lying,” he defended, a heated frown dragging his stunned features down. “She didn’t have to tell me anything or come to my room, you know.”

 _And if she did have to lie, then it’s no surprise why and how she has to sneak out now_ , he kept bitterly to himself.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she turned on the charms and did her whole ‘cute’ routine just to get you in on this.” The look on Yakko’s face from the pause just screamed _I’m right, aren’t I? I’m always right, aren’t I?_

The tip of Wakko’s tail began frizzing up, but he tried keeping his voice steady and his arms from shaking. He did not need a migraine on top of feeling so frustrated and tired.

“It’s not that big a deal,” he mumbled, and Yakko laughed. He laughed? He laughed! He thought it was funny, did he? “It’s not!”

“Okay, now that’s cute. If this wasn’t her sixth time doing it, I’d tell myself ‘it’s no big deal’ all day and let her off the hook. Why she has you in on this, I’ve no idea. Dot must really be desperate.”

Wakko’s jaw clenched tighter than he’d ever felt it as those words rattled around his skull. _Desperate?_ What was he? Some dumb-easy scapegoat? Apparently it was a crime if Dot chose his company over Yakko’s. Could his own sister not go to him for advice, or comfort, or just to talk the same way he could easily go to her? He bet if started sneaking out or coming home whenever he pleased, nobody would even notice.

Nobody would notice he was gone.

By some lousy and delayed miracle, Yakko seemed to finally realize what was happening, and what was being said, and who he had offended into silence by throwing around such careless words. His expression snapped over to something else and he moved his mouth to say something, but it was too late; Wakko’s head was already pounding, his eyes were burning fast, and his mouth was sporting fresh new teeth marks.

“Sometimes Yakko,” he muttered, planning on spending the rest of the day hiding in bed, “sometimes I wish you’d just shut up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time for another big biased extra-special thank you! A major shoutout to the wonderful [Traumedic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Traumedic/pseuds/Traumedic) who is an amazing writer and another amazing motivator for me! Thank you for turning your silent story lurking to some beautiful story lurking! 💖 🤗
> 
> Also, I am SUPER excited to soon be getting my first ever Animaniacs art commission from [TheTimeLimit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTimeLimit/pseuds/TheTimeLimit) of a Warner OC I envisioned when I was 12. I will be writing a touchy thank-you note 💖 and explaining her little backstory when the time comes. Maybe in the future I’ll ask for a commission comic of a scene from one of the chapters. Which one? I don’t know. What do you lovely readers think? 👀


	28. Fools in April II

On the whole, the reshooting and guest appearances were remarkably fast-paced, fun, and peaceful. It seemed almost too good to be true. Dot should have known this.

The afternoon was getting around to 3:34 p.m. when she jumped up the final apartment step and used her personal spare key to get in. She poked her head under the threshold and strained her ears for any movement in another room. Nothing in the den, no one was on the couch or in the kitchen, and as Dot shuffled inside and eased the door shut, all seemed quiet upstairs. She stashed her shoes and coat in the closet like they were due to explode any second, then crept to her bedroom.

Oh, the mother of clichés birthed a nice one. Dot had been halfway up the stairs when Yakko came out of his room. The spare key she could hide. Her shiny purse, the smell of coffee, and expressive makeup she could not.

Yakko crossed his arms. “We went out looking pretty today, didn’t we?”

Dot copied his posture. “Not ‘we,’ just me, myself, and I.”

“My apologies, then. Where have all three of you been this fine afternoon?”

“Somewhere you weren’t.”

Other than a tilted head and one hand on his hip, Yakko didn’t offer any of his usual brow raises or exasperated comments to preface yet another lecture of why sneaking out was so wrong, and why she needed to watch how she spoke, and blah, blah, blah.

“You don’t say. I take it all of your good dresses are piled in bed, or you found a mannequin to fool me this time.”

“Neither, and you don’t need my help to be a fool.”

What was so hard to understand that _Dot was bound by contract_ , so she had to get out of the apartment to work and work hard. It had been a long, long time since she first walked on a green screen backdrop − almost nine years, to be exact − all giddy with excitement to be on television. She guessed the joy was still there in a way whenever she had to be in a soundstage, but in reality she needed to be tough to make it in Hollywood all by her lonesome.

The hole in Yakko’s head had been outgrowing his big mouth lately if he believed “you’re grounded” would magically OK Dot’s schedule to be wiped, kick out her stress, and make her moody in a more acceptable way.

“You’re grinding your teeth, princess.”

“Thanks, Captain Obvious. I hadn’t noticed.”

Dot made a start to move past Yakko and shifted through whatever was in her purse to keep herself distracted. Her sass was already beginning to flare up. She didn’t need her face doing the same.

“You don’t notice a lot of things that go on around this apartment.”

Two pairs of eyes blinked in unison over at Wakko including himself in the conversation. Neither had heard his door opening or noticed him standing out in the hall until he spoke up.

“How come you were so desperate for me to cover for you earlier?” He went on, absolutely no hesitation or thrill in his tone.

Dot’s eyes opened wide in surprise, and if Yakko hadn’t been standing there, she would’ve signed for him to shut the hell up. How dare he just blurt that out? That was supposed to be their little secret!

Wakko shrugged and gestured behind her. “He already knew by two o’clock.”

His loose lips were still frustrating, but then again Dot had left pretty early and if it had taken Yakko that long to realize she’d been gone, that was a new record.

“Please. I would’ve figured it out eventually,” Yakko put in with a shake of the head. “Wakko’s beautiful display of gymnastics only solidified my suspicions.”

“Your suspicions,” Dot repeated. She chuckled bitterly and stepped back to lean on the stair’s banister. “Suspicions that would’ve made you feel like an asshole had I actually been in my room all day?”

 _There we go_ , she thought at Yakko’s on-time narrowing of the eyes. It was followed by a strict “language!” from Wakko, the most serious Dot had ever heard him utter the word when it was usually lackadaisical. She shot a glare his way, only wanting one reason to take Tylenol later on.

“Shut up. When Yakko gangs up on me, all of a sudden you’re the profanity marshal, too? Give me a break.”

“I wouldn’t have to be if you watched your bloody mouth.”

Dot held up one of her fists. “I’ll give you a good pop in the mouth.”

Wakko returned her glare with one of his own. “Try it.”

“Excuse me, but can we”—Yakko gestured between himself and Dot—“get back on track? Sis, I thought I made it perfectly clear you were not to do or see any movies.”

“You did. You said nothing about photoshoots, guest appearances, lunch with Evan Kleiman—”

“ _Dot_ ,” Yakko stressed out.

“So technically I’ve upheld your unfair demands,” she carried on. “I’ve been ungrounding myself in order to get to the studio, and believe you me, the hours on my feet are punishment enough. I’m always thrilled to ground myself once I get back.”

A rough patch of silence wedged between the three having some sort of stare-off in the middle of the hallway. The only thing moving on them were their eyes towards one another and their tails tensely swaying behind them. Yakko eventually broke off the collective silent treatment with an irritated huff and a harsh thump to lean against the wall.

“Dot, is this going to be a recurring theme?” He had asked it so quietly that she had to perk up an ear. “Answer carefully. You say what I don’t want to hear or make another one of your sorry pubescent remarks, it will become a problem.”

She pushed her tongue into her cheek. “Coming from the teenager always spouting sorry pubescent remarks himself?”

Another thing of silence rubbed them all the wrong way, and once again Yakko was the eventual voice or noise to move it along. Dot just hadn’t expected him to laugh under his breath and gesture toward her in order to do it.

“When you’re on my level, that’s when you can criticize me. Until then, stick to tea parties Dottie.”

She sneered at the use of the nickname and the jab at her conflicting age. “I—”

“Hate you? Yeah, so I’ve heard ten times.”

Dot’s dark eyes burned a fierce, uncompromising annoyance and the lights around her seemed too out of focus. She was not about to cry. She wasn’t.

“Yakko, you are honestly—”

“Driving you crazy? Feeling’s mutual.”

He was on a rapid-fire defense. Nothing he had guessed she was going to say so far was untrue, but it only spiked Dot’s temper into the yellow zone. If Wakko hadn’t been around, it definitely would’ve gone past red. She could only mumble for him to shut up, keep her eyes on the verge of tearing up for some unknown reason down on the carpet, and shrug off the uncomfortable feeling of two stares on her.

“Um…” Wakko cleared his throat, and when Dot felt okay to look up again, he weakly pointed his thumb to the side. “While you were gone, Yakko wanted to call a family meeting for tonight.”

_Probably about me, the jerk._

“At first, I didn’t like the sound of it and kind of…blew up at him.”

Now that was something Dot had to see to believe. Wakko? Sweet-natured, loving, quiet Wakko Warner ‘blowing up’ at their older brother? She had to wonder what exactly had been said and how bad it had to have been if Yakko currently wasn’t commenting on it.

Dot nodded. “Good for you.”

“No, not good for me. I wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t left and made me lie for you.”

“Oh, I’m so very sorry. The next time I have a deadline, I’ll tell them to take a hike because I don’t want my brothers squabbling.”

“The next time you have a deadline,” Wakko heatedly corrected, “don’t come to me if you’re that desperate enough. Who would you recommend she go to, Yakko?” He suddenly turned on the eldest, whose eyes jumped open wide.

A third and hopefully final beat of silence pressed into their ears. It was just becoming more and more expected at this point, and Dot was kind of relieved when Wakko opted to break it with a simple, quiet statement:

“Maybe we do need a family meeting.”

Dot scoffed out a laugh. “We need therapy.”

“Can’t. Scratchy’s gonna be out of town for three weeks.”

“How do you know this?” Yakko had finally said something, but received no answer. He looked from one to the other, still not getting any feedback, and slumped just a bit on the wall. “Therapy, Dot?”

“I was kidding.”

“Yeah? Well, all jokes aside sibs…” Yakko looked like he was about to make a deprecating joke, then decided against it. “We’re a mess.”

“A godforsaken mess,” Wakko added.

Dot face-palmed at the dramatics but couldn’t help offering her own two cents. “And it’s only 2002.”

Even though wishful thinking had fallen flat and another round of silence was freshly served, it didn’t seem to bother the disquieted and agitated trio as much. They had never stood so frigid around one another and started staring with less energy than they’d done before. Sometimes they shook their heads away from eye contact, seemed like they were about to say something but then backpedaled, or gave a delayed reaction.

Yakko was the runner-up once more. “So, what’s it gonna be?”

“Uh, no.” Dot shook her head, almost laughing at the idea of sitting in a chair that didn’t have a script in front of it. “I am not going to a therapist. That’s just weird.”

“You brought it up,” Wakko pointed out.

“I wasn’t serious about it.”

“Well I am. A little.”

“Why? We already have Scratchansniff.”

“Not now, we don’t. Apparently he’s out of town for, what, three weeks?” Yakko looked over at Wakko for clarification, who let out a quiet ‘yep’. “It wouldn’t hurt to see the old man again and catch up on things when he gets back.”

Dot could easily do that over the phone, or through a letter, or on her own terms without tailing her brothers and being asked the same “and how does that make you feel” humdrum. She wanted to scoff at the idea but heard herself laughing instead. _A therapist, now really._ She was not that kind of girl.

“You boys can go. Say hi to him for me.”

Wakko turned towards her, looking and kind of sounding offended. “Why wouldn’t you want to see him, too?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

Dot huffed her bangs out of her face and badly wanted to rub the headache out of her temples. “Can we back up here for a second? Because if you’re actually serious about what I said, there’s a difference between a therapist and a psychiatrist.”

Yakko nodded. “For starters, they’re spelled differently.”

Dot glared as the headache expanded. “Don’t start with the jokes. I’m already looking at a bigger one right now and it’s making my head hurt.”

“I’m not a mirror.”

Dot would have thrown her purse, though she most likely would have missed Yakko’s face or he would’ve caught and kept it if she was still under house arrest. She turned to Wakko, sensing another storm of why not’s if she didn’t answer his specific question.

“It’s not that I don’t want to see Scratchansniff,” she started to explain, faltered, then restarted. “Personally, I mean. He’s a good guy and if I wanted to, I could just go and…I can see him on my own time to chat or whatever. If I’m not still grounded by then,” she added with a cold frown.

Yakko shrugged. “Depends if you plan on passing off that attitude.”

“I don’t have an attitude problem. You have a problem with my attitude, and that’s not my problem.”

“There’s another problem,” Yakko listed off, promptly getting Dot to roll her eyes. “You think talking like that is cute.”

“I’m talking, big deal.”

“Speaking of talking,” Wakko cut in before a verbal typhoon could flood the apartment, “I think we’re forgetting what Dot said. Scratchy is a psychiatrist, and I know he said we could talk to him if we just asked, but…that wouldn’t be the same as a therapist talking to us.”

There they went again on the whole therapist topic. The second time around was just as annoying as the first. Yakko and Wakko couldn’t be serious.

“You think Scratchansniff would recommend us one if we asked?” Why did Yakko sound like he was earnestly considering professional help?

“Who’s asking?” Dot blurted out, but he didn’t hear her and neither did Wakko.

“I think so.”

Yakko, still pressed to the wall, seemed to straighten his posture at the reply and practically searched Wakko’s face for any tricks. Dot really wished he had found one when he asked, “And you think we need one?”

Wakko lowered his gaze to the ground. “Maybe.”

Dot just watched in silence and clenched her fists, barely noticing how the tips of her fingers dug into the soft of her palms. The only thing she was aware of was the sound of her own heart pushing against her chest. _Therapy?_ _What a joke._ The idea of relying on a complete stranger, someone who didn’t even know her and wanted her full attention so she could vent her heart out, just made her feel…

Well, she didn’t know what yet, but it didn’t make her feel good.

The only attention Dot was dependent on was the studio’s and if they were giving her the time of day. Why couldn’t anyone understand that first? Yakko had been painting her out to be a ‘good girl gone bad’ case lately just because she was talking and going out more, and it was like Wakko spun a roulette wheel to see if one day he would be on her side, agreeing with Yakko nonstop, or completely distancing himself from them both entirely.

It wasn’t until Dot blew up her bangs again that she felt something run cold on her cheek. She smacked the escaped tear away and wound up tearing up more when she poked herself in the eye.

“I don’t need a therapist. I’m perfectly fine.”

Yakko gestured around his face. “Then what do you call this?”

“A little bit of everything. You pissing me off, and whenever Wakko has his quiet days.” A giggle burst out of her mouth, being shut up too little, too late with her palm. Dot shook her head, keeping her hand near her mouth. “Then it goes back to you again, Yakko, just _assuming_ I’m some delinquent now because okay, fine, I sneak out! You want me to start throwing a ladder out the window or putting mannequins in my bed now?”

Her head hurt too much. Her stomach hurt too much. It seemed that everything on her suddenly wanted to hurt so damn much. Dot hadn’t been home for more than twenty minutes and already karma was sticking it to her good.

“You want a family meeting so bad? Sounds good to me! While you’re at it, ground me for another two weeks so I can plan my next big escape. Don’t worry Wakko, I won’t bother you again to cover for me. Yakko will figure it out eventually.”

The stabbing offense in her abdomen started to push forward. Dot ignored the deep breaths she so desperately wanted to take in and the racing heartbeat she failed to keep down.

“See? We don’t need therapy. We can just meet in the hallway every Monday and talk right here for free! Matter of fact, let’s just nip my teenage angst _bullshit_ in the bud. You want your perfectly pristine baby sister back? Here”—Dot tore open her purse, sending its contents noisily clattering in front of her—“take it all away! Call my agent and tell him I’m grounded forever, Yakko. Flush my planner down the toilet, Wakko. Throw it all out!”

Her face had to be red and wet by now. It hurt and burned so badly that she could hardly push aside the raw desperation that strobed in and out of focus all around her.

“Then it can just be the three of us,” she wrapped up in a hoarse, angry, stale whisper. “All together, just like how it used to be in the good ol’ days. Nothing else for us to do but _not_ grow up and _not_ have any responsibilities for ourselves. We don’t need anybody else. We have each other.”

Dot had been running on pure adrenaline, and much like her backside on the wall, it slid and dropped stone cold to the floor. She had no energy to stomp away, or cry in her knees, or get to her bedroom just to slam the door shut. She just sat, staring at absolutely nothing while her brothers stared back.

“We don’t need anybody else,” Dot repeated under her breath. “Nobody else. We…we have…lost it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! I wanna get real for a second. I’ve noticed how my writing style in current chapters of this story have made an incredible leap in length, lore, and description since I first started back in mid-2020. I’m really proud of that, but three chapters I’ve become very self-conscious about and was tempted to delete—but I didn’t. I’ve decided I’m going to rename and rewrite them.
> 
> In my notes, Chapters 8 and 9 have been rewritten, and I’m halfway done with Chapter 7. I feel they didn’t exactly add to the storyline how I wanted them to, and that made me angry with myself. I want to give my readers the best, even in the craziest, most angsty-filled fandom I’ve become a part of. The changes I made won’t affect the current timeline/drama/angst going on, but they will get rid of those random introduction of old/new characters and give you more insight on the Warners’ personalities.
> 
> So very soon when I give the signal, if you would like to go back in time and see what I intended to happen, feel free—but no pressure! There won’t be any other zany edits from here on out. That is all! 🤎 💙 💖


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